With too much time on hands, thought I'd google 'life cycle analysis / environmental impact of EVs'. Turns out a recent (oct 4, 2012) Norwegian University study published in the 'The Journal of Industrial Ecology' has sparked tons of articles and hoopla based on its findings of production, use and disposal impact of EV vs conventional gas/diesel vehicles. Not fud'ing, just seeing what's 'out there'. example of what has spawned - Electric Vehicles: Front Loading The Filth - Seeking Alpha Also in link above - "This article was sent to 3,687 people who get email alerts on TSLA"
Classic academic bait and switch. They evaluate manufacturing and disposal processes of batteries and then claim the end use of electric powered cars is the problem. Let's make this clear. If you take any automobile, grind it up and dump the remains into the environment, that's a BIG issue, regardless of the technology used.
The seeking alpha piece hits a study that is not well correlated with other studies. There is much uncertainty here. An except from the paper. Comparative Environmental Life Cycle Assessment of Conventional and Electric Vehicles - Hawkins - 2012 - Journal of Industrial Ecology - Wiley Online Library bold italics mine.
Their energy results are completely mainstream: About 10% of the lifetime energy use of a conventional car is in the manufacturing, and EVs save maybe 25% of the GHG emissions at current European grid mix. Both of those are in the ballpark of pretty much every other rational calculation I've seen. They attribute a far higher share of lifetime GHG emissions to manufacturing, for EVs, than I have seen elsewhere, but that's addressed in their discussion section. It's not implausible, given the exotic materials used to manufacture the electronics. Couldn't say one way or the other on that. If you read the study, the reason for the higher toxicity is pretty straightforward: "The additional production phase toxicity impacts of EVs stem mostly from additional copper requirements and, in the case of NCM EVs, nickel requirements. Toxic emissions from the production chain of these metals mostly occur in the disposal of the sulfidic mine tailings, which accounts for roughly 75% of the HTP from the production phase." (HTP = human toxicity potential) You have to mine and smelt more copper to make an EV. That's a dirty process. Tough to argue with that. They specifically note that the toxicity isn't from the disposal phase. What's entirely missing is any notion of how much this adds to total toxicity burden for the average person. Is this like eating one more hamburger per year, or like sticking your head in a bucket of benzene every morning? No clue as to whether the toxicity is significant as a fraction of total human exposure or not. Ten minutes of Googling didn't help. I guess I'd say it's plausible that the manufacture is more toxic, for exactly the reason they stated. Whether or not this matters much, there was no way to judge.
About 16 million tons of new copper is produced a year, and 80% of copper ever produced is still in use. That is a large proportion of recycling. My main criticism is that there is great ability to recycle, and that was talked about, but not accounted for well in the numbers. If you recycle the copper and use it for 1M miles that is a very different impact than 200,000 km. Copper.org: CDA Press Releases: February 20, 2012, Electric Vehicle Popularity Grows as Gas Prices Rise That 150-180 lbs of copper in a bev will be worth recycling.
As I read it, the study used the mix of virgin and recycled materials that matches the current reality. Or some estimate of that. For copper, in the US, about half comes from scrap, but only half of that is post-consumer. For the world as a whole I think the number is lower. Copper.org: Copper in the USA: Copper Producers Near as I can tell , about half the copper in a car gets recycled now: http://www.google.com/url?q=http://environment.research.yale.edu/documents/downloads/v-z/WorkingPaper10-PartC.pdf&sa=U&ei=Ke_lUMbfG-W40gHjmoDoDQ&ved=0CC8QFjAIOAo&usg=AFQjCNGAv-Vf775NJCizSlVYcL559Jgt8Q It's possible that will be vastly better for EVs. Insulated copper wire scrap sells for maybe $2/lb, bare bright wire for maybe $3.50, $0.65/lb for alternators. (Who know they had their own well-defined commodity price, e.g., Scrap Metal Prices,Recycling News,Scrap Buyers,Metal Recycling,Scrap Yard,Buy Offer,RG Steel Prices|Scrap Monster). So we're talking about like -- $400 ? -- if you could get every bit from an EV. Plausible you'd get more recycled. Still lose some in the physical processing, no matter what. E.g., 80KW motor like the Leaf weighs about 80 kilos, call it 200 lbs? If you got about the same price for a motor as for an alternator, that would pay $130 to pull it and ship it for recycling. Plausible you'd get a reasonable share of them that way. OTOH if market incentives aren't enough, it might require regulation. Don't the Europeans require 95% of a car to be recycled? The big unanswered question is whether or not this is a tempest in a teacup. When I think about my personal adverse health effects from copper mining, I'm pretty sure it's pretty close to nil.
The outlook is for China and other emerging markets to increase copper usage, which has already pushed up the price, and likely this will continue. Since the copper is fairly easy to get to in an EV, it is more likely to be recycled, not less. We don't need to regulate recycling here, the problem is pollution in the mines. Regulate the mines and other copper production to pollute less. Each million BEVs produced in a year will consume about 0.25% of the copper used each year. If copper pollution is the problem its outside of BEVs, although millions of EVs each year would push copper prices higher. I'm not quite sure what that means but 1) Copper pollution is not greatly increased with plug-in cars 2) Large numbers of plug-ins - Millions a year will drive up copper prices. 3) Higher copper prices will result in a high rate of recycling of copper in the plug-in cars.
Per the USGS, in 2003, transportation (which I can see from other sources is almost entirely cars and trucks) accounted for 10% of US copper consumption. minerals.usgs.gov/ds/2005/140/copper-use.xls Or here, which may be the same data, graphed: Copper End Uses So talking about tripling use of copper, for that purpose, that could be noticeable. If and only if the health impact of that increase matters, relative to the toxin load faced by the average person now. And that's the piece of information that's still missing. The paper quotes umpty-grams-per-mile of toxin-equivalents, it would be nice to know that as a % of average annual toxin load. Could be they're talking about a material increase in a trivial toxin load -- a tempest in a teacup.
Randomly linking two independent variables creates meaningless conclusions. The waste/toxic runoff is determined by the regulations, economics, and politics of mining and manufacturing the raw metal. It is not determined by how the end material is used. It is the same as telling me that the destruction of the Ozone layer is directly proportional to how much foam we need. (Note, the CFC reduction was not achieved by reducing either foam or air conditioning.)
You are assuming we go from 0 to 100% bev cars, if you are assuming trippling of copper. How about 10% plug in rate? That would push autos from 10% to 11.7% of copper useage. Again if you have a problem with the pollution, then increasing copper usage about 2% will not materially effect health outcomes. Its either bad today, or won't be bad with significant penetration of plug-ins. Again, I don't really understand the expression, but its fairly clear that copper mining pollution is not greatly increased by plug-in cars. Certainly there are things that can be done, with or without plug-ins to reduce the health impacts. If mining regulations push up copper costs, then there is even more reason to recycle the copper, making it go more miles. +1 It seems many people want to subscribe electrical pollution or mining pollution to hybrids and plug-ins. Remember the sudsbury mine meme about the prius being the biggest polluter. This is no different. The pollution is there whether there are plug-ins or not. From an environmental point of view, it makes no sense to blame future cars for today's old coal power plants, or old mining pollution. If these are problems with plug-ins, then they are problems regardless of producing them. This should be no excuse to stick with the copper and nickle and platinum mining pollution with today's vehicles.
