Dear Editor:
Just a little reading is required to understand that electric vehicles (EVs) are not the environmental saviour they are touted to be.
The manufacturing of EVs has a huge carbon footprint, especially from the mining and processing of raw materials for batteries. Mining equipment is powered by fossil fuels. One calculation reported that overall, an EV only emits 24% less carbon-dioxide than a gas powered vehicle – not exactly zero emissions.
Another problem is that a good portion of the cobalt used in the batteries comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where children as young as seven years of age are earning $1 a day digging cobalt with hand tools, and as a result suffering from chronic lung disease from cobalt dust.
The Ontario government needs to make sure that any EV batteries manufactured in Ontario use only cobalt mined here, as other sources are not tracked to exclude child-mined cobalt.
The EV industry needs to clean this up because otherwise buying an EV is no different than, for example, buying something made by the forced labour of Uyghurs in Communist China.
The materials in EV batteries are “rare” earths. Will these earths be all mined out just when governments have legislated away gas-powered vehicles?
EV batteries are also extremely dangerous. They can blow up in an accident and the resulting fire is hard for firefighters to put out. In a California case, firefighters had to extinguish three spontaneous fires in the same battery over a six-day period. Will insurance costs rise if firefighters have to stand watch over EV batteries that have been breached in an accident?
Not only are accidents a problem, but end-of-life recycling for EV batteries requires specialized care as the individual cells in the batteries can blow up when taken apart. Ontario will need to build a recycling industry for these batteries.
It is critical that none of these batteries is allowed to deteriorate and their contents leak into the environment as a 20-gram cell phone battery can pollute a water body equivalent to three standard swimming pools and if it is buried in the ground, it can pollute 1 square kilometer (247 acres) of land for about 50 years, so said Wu Feng, a professor at Beijing Institute of Technology.
Extrapolate that to a huge EV battery; these batteries could poison us long before climate change gets us. Maybe a rethink on EVs is in order.
Jane Vandervliet,
Erin