Along with the massive recent manufacturing investments in electric vehicle (EV) technology and talks of a greener, decarbonized future, there are some not-so-green problems.
In its latest New Energy Finance report, Bloomberg News predicts there will be some 730 million EVs on the road by 2040. The year before, Bloomberg predicted half of all U.S. vehicle sales would be battery electric by 2030.
In Canada, too, there’s talk of a big economic boost with the transition to EVs — including 250,000 jobs and $48 billion a year added to the nation’s economy through the creation of a domestic supply chain.
Governments have already invested tens of billions into two EV battery manufacturing plants in southwestern Ontario. However, they come with the environmental dilemma of what to do with the millions of EV batteries when they reach the end of their life.
“The rules are non-existent,” said Mark Winfield, a professor at York University in Toronto and co-chair of the school’s Sustainable Energy Initiative. "There is nothing as we talk to agencies on both sides of the border, the federal, provincial, state levels.
“In the case of Ontario, the answer was actually that we have no intention of doing anything about this.”
Key word was cheaply, current costs if synthetic fuels are two to four times the current market rate at best, not available to the public, and heavily limited in their inability to scale within the necessary timeframe.
Any vehicle’s metal components can be scraped and recycled, and if your talking about component reuse EVs have far, far fewer consumable parts as compared to ICEs. While you can rebuild an engine with all new consumables, we’ve also been rewiring motors for just as long, and indeed the motor has far fewer wear items that require a rebuild in the first place. Indeed given the thriving conversation space and its demand for EV parts, they are often more recycled than all but classic models of ICE. EV batteries have proven trivial to recycle, and the frame and such are practically identical to ICE versions.
The majority of plastics are single use and a landfilled, and are just as prevalent in ICE’s as EVs.
The higher rate of write offs for minor incidents is consistent across many new vehicles, and is more a case of insurers lacking a large dataset from which to draw stats from than any inherent technological factor.