There will be no Green Revolution Without a Recycling Revolution

Lithium Mining, Electric Cars, and Recycling

Chile’s Atacama Desert is one of the driest deserts in the world, a fascinating stretch of hyperarid land in which life makes its presence spectacularly known every 5–7 years through flowery “super blooms”. Unfortunately, this increasingly fragile ecosystem is also rich in highly coveted minerals and rare-earth metals such as copper and lithium, which has made the Atacama Desert a key target for the metals industry and an important site of contestation over water and land rights led by local groups and Indigenous communities.

Despite strong local resistance, the lithium company SQM recently announced its plans to expand lithium production in Chile’s Atacama salt flats. The reason: strong indications of a market boom driven largely by a growing demand for electric vehicles worldwide.

As a recent article by the National Geographic indicates, the number of electric vehicles on the road is “expected to rise from 10 million in 2020 to upwards of 145 million by 2030.” With this, demand for battery minerals and rare-earth metals such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper is also expected to grow, intensifying an environmentally-destructive tension between the clean transit boom and the dirty mining boom. The problem is not necessarily the demand for electric vehicles (although a strong case has and should be made for investing in the expansion and greening of public transport as a means to reduce the need for personal-use vehicles within densely populated cities).

The problem is that the current transition to clean modes of transportation like electric cars continues to rely heavily on mining. As the case of the Atacama Desert shows, the demand for lithium is encouraging the expansion of mining projects that in turn jeopardize already fragile ecosystems as well as the sovereignty and livelihood of local communities. Factor into this the wide availability of lithium worldwide and you end up with a particularly bleak view of the future of our ecosystems and corresponding inhabitants — one in which the primary beneficiaries are the world’s mining companies, electric vehicle producers, and Global North consumer’s who’s “contribution” to climate change mitigation is their purchase of a new car.

To halt the expansion and planning of new mining project without undermining the clean transport industry, we will need to mobilize a series of experts, investors, innovators, and policymakers to enhance our recycling methods and capacities. Recycling will help us not only limit socially and environmentally harmful extractive practices, but also avoid decommissioned batteries piling up in landfills where they will leak toxic materials that will eventually make their way back into the ground and into our water sources.

There is no denying that a much-needed Green Revolution will require high amounts of lithium. As such, a pressing question at the moment is that of how to effectively keep this metal in the ground while maximizing the use and availability of already extracted and used lithium. At the moment, the recovering of the metal from recycled batteries is our best option.

On the recycling end, effective lithium recycling must be driven by policy and innovation. Investments must be directed to the development of recycling methods that can effectively disassemble electric car batteries and improve high-quality recovery rates in ways that are clean and energy-efficient.

On the policy end, we need to establish strong standards around design, recyclability, and mineral recovery rates that will push electric vehicle producers like Tesla to design and produce in environmentally friendly ways. This would also reduce the chances of decommissioned batteries ending up in landfills while allowing recyclers to recover high-quality materials more easily.

These policies must also be accompanied by laws and regulations that incentivize partnerships with second life battery users, ban landfills, and clearly define what we mean by “waste” and “reuse” while making it easier to trace battery lifetimes, recycle used batteries (e.g. batter take-back programs), and transport hazardous battery waste across jurisdictions for recycling.

Additionally, governments will need to invest in green public transport and infrastructure, encourage car sharing, ensure viable second life uses for lithium-ion batteries, and incentivize innovative development of green technologies.

These strategies would help reduce demand for electric vehicles and new mining projects and make recycled materials more appealing and accessible.

In other words, if mining industries wish to continue to have a place in the twenty-first century, they will have to figure out how to mine from landfills instead of natural landscapes.

Additional Resources

Dominish, E., Florin, N., Wakefield-Rann, R., (2021). Reducing new mining for electric vehicle battery metals: responsible sourcing through demand reduction strategies and recycling. Report prepared for Earthworks by the Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney. Available at https://www.earthworks.org/publications/recycle-dont-mine/