'[Electric car batteries] have relatively fixed lifetimes,' said Professor Tom Welton, president of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He stated that there will come a time very soon when there will be a 'tsunami of batteries ready to be replaced.'
“It needs investment from governments as well as the private sector,” he stressed.Earlier this year, the U.K. government delayed its Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Strategy, which is thought to include policies on recycling. In response, the U.K.’s Local Government Association said there was a “lack of coherent strategic direction at a national level, including no articulation of the vision for the future.
“Battery technology is providing us with a pathway towards decarbonization,” said Welton, “but we can’t treat it trivially; we have to treat it seriously, and a big part of this is recycling those elements making sure we get these scarce elements back to be reused again rather than just disposed of, and ending up in landfill.
Carmakers, urges Welton, should be thinking not “how slick [a car] looks on the forecourt, but how can this car be taken apart to recover all of the materials from which it’s made, so that they can be recycled and reused.”“We can see the problem coming. Let’s do what is necessary now to ensure that we don’t get to some crisis in the future.