China: Green cars are creating… a huge pollution problem
Over the past decade, China has rapidly expanded its "green" industry of "New Energy" (NEV) vehicles, ie electric, but the recycling and disposal of hundreds of thousands of tons of used car batteries has become a huge and urgent problem due to the not really “Green” modalities used for the operation.
The growth of the NEV industry in China took off in 2014 when nearly 78,500 of such cars were produced and about 75,000 were sold. As of September this year, China's NEV registration reached 6.78 million, of which 5.52 million are fully electric vehicles.
The NEV industry expects its production and sales growth rate to remain above 40% over the next five years, posing the question of how to best manage the growing number of lithium batteries discarded by NEVs.
Beautiful, beautiful, but all this creates some big problems. According to the latest data from the China Automotive Technology and Research Center, the demolition of Chinese electric car batteries reached 200,000 tons in 2020 and the figure is estimated to rise to 780,000 tons by 2025. Given that the life of an electric car average is between 5 and 8 years and its warranty in China is between 4 and 6, you can understand that soon there will be a real invasion of exhausted batteries to be disposed of!
According to Wu Feng, a professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, “A 20-gram cell phone battery can pollute a body of water equivalent to three standard swimming pools. If it is buried in the ground, it can pollute 1 square kilometer of land for about 50 years ”. Here we are talking about enormously larger batteries.
In this moment the problem is solved "Chinese style": Exhausted batteries are put on a black market for recycling, with zero guarantees that toxic materials will not end up in the ground or in the environment. According to Chinese state media, the recycling price of car lithium batteries ranges from $ 1,250 to $ 1,563 US dollars per tonne. Official prices are much higher than those on the black market, where there is no control over what is disposed of, so it is estimated that eighty percent of these residues take the dark road. The first scandalous cases begin to emerge, with a lead smelter in Liaoning, where in 2018 300 tons of lead resulting from these operations were seized and workers spilled 50 tons of sulfuric acid directly into the ground.
China is therefore preparing to face a huge ecological problem, for trying to become "Green" …
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The article China: ecological cars are creating… a huge pollution problem comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/cina-le-auto-ecologiche-stanno-creando-un-enorme-problema-di-inquinamento/ on Fri, 19 Nov 2021 10:00:41 +0000.