Letter to the Editor: The Inconvenient Truth About Lithium-Ion Batteries

I was motivated to write this letter when I received an e-mail about the regional workshop for land care professionals.

I believe that climate change and global warming are real and that they pose an existential threat to all life on earth. Everything we have been told about the harmful impacts of fossil fuels on people and the environment, including global warming and climate change, is true. I also believe that electric batteries have to be an important part of the “green strategy” that will move us away from reliance on fossil fuels.

When I received the poster for the lawn care workshop I couldn’t help but notice the headline — Quiet Clean Healthy. Whenever we talk about sustainability and the need to convert to green energy, including lithium-ion batteries, we correctly and appropriately point out the harmful impacts to people and the environment from the technology we don’t like — fossil fuels. What is never part of the discussion is the harmful impacts on people and the environment from the technology we do like — lithium-ion batteries.

Lithium-ion batteries are green and clean and healthy in Lexington. But, when researchers look at the batteries “cradle-to-grave,” it turns out that they have their own carbon footprint. The technology is dirty, just less dirty than the fossil fuel alternative.

There are numerous social justice and environmental justice issues associated with the mining and refinement of cobalt and lithium, the two key components in lithium-ion batteries. 

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is the source of 70% of the cobalt currently used worldwide. Artisanal miners — adults and children — live in abject poverty and work under slave labor conditions. People suffer from a variety of health issues, including “hard metal disease,” respiratory sensitization, asthma, shortness of breath, and other pulmonary illnesses. Women in that country who are connected to cobalt mining are forced to have sex with miners, and some contract sexually transmitted diseases. Some women are forced into lives of prostitution. Young girls are raped because local superstition holds that having sex with a virgin will bring luck in the mines.

There are lithium rich regions in North and South America, but these are either beneath or adjacent to land where indigenous people, including Native Americans, have established communities. In North America, these would be reservations, to which Native Americans were forcibly relocated. The indigenous people feel that that their way of life is being threatened. They fear that huge industrial mines will have long term health impacts, ravage their local environments, pollute their drinking water, and threaten the plants and animals their cultures depend on.

My intention and hope is that when staff and elected and appointed officials, and their respective boards, committees, and commissions, talk about the many benefits of reducing reliance on fossil fuels, they take “green and clean and healthy” off the list. The science does not support that claim and the social and environmental justice issues associated with lithium-ion batteries invalidates it. The inconvenient truth is that we are trading a dirty technology for a less dirty technology, but a less dirty technology that will support the fight against climate change, global warming, and the effort to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

Lexington residents are smart and thoughtful. I believe that informing residents about the issues associated with lithium-ion batteries — that we acknowledge the bad as well as the good — will not harm support for our green transition. Rather, it will make the advocacy for a green transition more credible.