The Dawn Of The E-Vehicle Battery Eco-Disaster

It’s all beginning to dawn on the greens: the looming environmental disaster of e-vehicle batteries.

When it comes to lithium-ion e-vehicles and the environmentalist greens and profiteers:

• They know it’s a disaster.
• We know it’s a disaster.
• They know that we know that they know it’s a disaster.
• But they still pretend it isn’t.*

The huge environmental problems of e-cars are emerging

Now it’s beginning to dawn on the greens: They’ve got a colossal environmental problem in the works – a problem they were warned about long ago and one they’ve refused to believe was real because it clashed with their vision of a green utopia.

Greens playing them down, hoping for solutions

At the moment they are playing it down, insisting solutions to avert the lithium-ion battery’s environmental problem will be found in time.

But they are clearly getting uneasy about it as the astronomical dimensions of the problem of producing 200 million lithium-ion car batteries – and the later disposing of them – are becoming undeniable.

Expert: “Urgent environmental issue” 

Not long ago, Nobel Prize-winning Japanese chemist and lithium battery researcher Akira Yoshino  warned that solutions for recycling these batteries were sorely needed and that it was becoming “an urgent environmental issue.”

Huge mess for the next generations

E-vehicle batteries, once having served their intended use in e-vehicles – after about 8 years – can be reused for other lower demand purposes – a so-called second life – such as a home battery.

But recycling them is inevitable – and it’s complicated, energy-intensive, and expensive. Nobody knows how many are currently actually recycled, or simply just getting thrown into the landfill.

We’re creating a huge, costly mess for the next generations.

Ending up in the trash “prematurely”

Worse, Claudia Scholz at the Handelsblatt here reports (English) that e-vehicle batteries are already increasingly ending up in the trash – and doing so “prematurely.”

“The e-car problem: thousands of tons of batteries end up in the trash prematurely.”

Already thousands of tons of batteries

The Handelsblatt reports how Matthias Schmidt, managing director of the recycling company Erlos, “is astonished”.

“Actually, his industry had expected to be inundated with batteries from recently produced electric cars only in eight or ten years,” writes the Handelsblatt. “In fact, however, thousands of tons of batteries are already ending up at waste disposal companies.

“‘We would never have imagined the quantities that would accumulate after such a short time,’ says Schmidt.

“His company alone and competitor Duesenfeld, both of which specialize in recycling car batteries, are recycling more than 4,000 tons of batteries from almost all e-models this year – including those that have only recently come onto the market.”

The dangerous half-knowledge of  green central planners

But that’s the way it is with these self-anointed masterminds, who at their universities were immunized against comprehending the dangers of their half-knowledge. What follows are how disastrous leftist ideas run their course:

• They’re convinced it’s a brilliant idea
• Ignore signs and warnings there is a disaster
• Play down the disaster as it emerges
• Acknowledge the disaster, but insist solutions are coming
• Move the goalposts when a solution doesn’t arrive
• Deny the disaster no matter what. But if you can’t:
• Then admit there is a disaster
• And then insist it was never your idea to begin with
• Hope it will be forgotten
• Blame it all on others if it isn’t

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*A variation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s original quote: “We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they, of course, know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying.

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