Batteries are a little-talked about yet integral piece of our future (and past) energy usage. We all know that fossil fuels will eventually run out and humankind must switch to renewable sources of energy, (regardless whether it happens during our generation or the next) and in order to capture that energy and store it, we will need the best batteries available. Thanks to a century and a half of innovation, batteries have continually optimized for power, capacity, durability, and safety. It has been a long road.
The first widely distributed battery was the lead-acid battery. These batteries were large and leaky, and manufactured at a time when we didn’t fully comprehend the damages that lead can cause when it infiltrates the blood stream. Once upon a time in the United States, we had lead in our paint, lead in our water pipes, and lead in our batteries. We mined a large proportion of this lead from mines in Louisiana and the safety measures were abysmal. People throughout the entire surrounding area of the mine were documented with lead in the their blood at high enough levels to incite a myriad of health problems, shortening life spans and inciting sickness and death. Eventually, in the 1970s, regulators recognized the bodily harm induced by lead and demanded more safety measures at the mining facilities (in addition to removing lead from paint and pipes). Many lessons were learned the hard way.
On the heels of the lead-acid battery came portable, disposable batteries, which brought a host of other pros and cons into the limelight. The pros were the use and enjoyment of portable electronics that revolutionized the modern world; things like flashlights, toys, and music players. The major con was the pile of trash they became once their charge was used up. “A profusion of products, many designed to be convenient and disposable, meant consumers were buying and throwing away more and more stuff. Although batteries accounted for less than one-tenth of the nation’s household trash, batteries accounted for the vast majority of the toxic heavy metals in household waste.” Logically, the industry began a campaign of recycling batteries for reuse (as they also did with lead-acid batteries as well).
Recycling batteries created new problems: It often took more energy to collect, sort, and ship them to recycling centers than was actually saved by avoiding the production of new raw materials. “In the case of energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and resource consumption, recycling was more costly than landfilling for existing recycling scenarios.” Here again, there were pros and cons, as our author elaborates: “Where it was a net positive was in reducing toxicity—meaning the threat of pollution to human health and the environment—although this was also the metric with the highest levels of uncertainty.”
While regulations in the United States were improving the health and safety of workers in the domestic mineral mines, those aboard were a different story. Cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, nickel mines in the arctic circle in Russia, and lithium mines in Chile and China all sprang up to meet the demand of precious metals needed for newer and more efficient batteries. However, the regulations in these areas lagged behind those in the United States, and many locals communities were (and still are) negatively effected. Their water is poisoned, their children grow up sick, and their land is pulverized until it is empty of minerals, at which point the companies move on. These problems have exacerbated as more and different minerals have been sought for a larger and wider supply of efficient batteries.
While the 1920s saw the rise in batteries attributed to the rise of household radios, the future will see battery production ramp up for usage in electric cars and other transportation vehicles. The newest on the market are lithium-ion batteries, most popularly used by Tesla in their fully-electric vehicles. A major positive for lithium-ion batteries is their rechargability—in addition to their longer-lifespan and low toxicity. Making batteries rechargeable has been another important step in helping to curb the creation of so much waste.
In his conclusion, Turner asserts that we must recognize the reality that a Prius or a Tesla “contributes a lot more than it doesn’t to the wildly high-polluting industrial practices that devastate our atmosphere, bodies, forests, rivers, oceans, wetlands, wildlife, and more.” Batteries these days have a large variety of precious metals that go into their manufacturing, and sourcing these materials from around the world is costly, both financially and environmentally, especially when you consider the fact that we are still using fossil fuels to do it. Even in our modern age, batteries still pose a need for a balance between two important factors: the need for clean, efficient, socially and environmentally friendly energy, and the reality that making these necessary batteries continues to harm our planet and our communities.
While there are many ways to help alleviate this problem, there is one that will change things the most: “reducing economic activity, downscaling consumption, and giving up on the ‘fantasy’ of decoupling economic growth from environmental impacts.” In short, we need to stop our constant growth, for as long as we are growing, we will continue to consume, and the earth only has so much to offer. This idea challenges the very basis of modern society, especially in more-developed countries such as the United States, and will be hard-pressed to be adopted. In the meantime, we must do our best to find the balance between what society demands and what our planet can safely offer.