Reducing transportation’s carbon footprint is not as easy as replacing internal combustion engine (ICE) cars with electric vehicles (EVs). Producing EVs and disposing their components have environmental and human rights impacts, which also need to be carefully considered and mitigated, Mongabay’s Mike DiGirolamo found in an episode of Mongabay Explores podcast in November. In this first episode of a podcast series on the circular economy, DiGirolamo talks to Jessika Richter, an associate senior lecturer at Lund University in Sweden who researches circular economy-related policies and technologies. “With electric vehicles or EVs, we see also particular issues in terms of some of the materials that are used for the batteries or for other parts of the vehicle that are not necessarily used for the ICE vehicles,” Richter tells DiGirolamo. She adds that the impacts of mining materials to make EV batteries, in particular, are becoming clearer as more research emerges on their supply chain. Lithium, for example, is mined in salt marsh ecosystems of places like Chile, while mining cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been shown to pollute the environment and local communities; Mongabay has reported on both issues. DiGirolamo says more than half of all transition minerals, or minerals needed for the development of clean energy technologies like EVs, occur on lands governed by Indigenous communities. “Protecting their rights, which are often ignored, is a key concern,” he says. While in a circular economy it’s ideal to source materials from recycling, there are not a lot…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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