Interesting paper on the problem of electronic waste associated with cars. [View all]
Last edited Wed Feb 8, 2017, 01:34 PM - Edit history (1)
I'm not a big fan of the car CULTure, something that runs through many things I've written here and elsewhere.
One of the fantasies that runs through first world wishful thinking types is that some day everyone will be driving swell electric cars, powered by wind and solar energy and that the car CULTure will become sustainable.
It hasn't. It isn't. It won't be.
One of the reasons it won't - and this reason also applies to why so called "renewable energy" isn't actually "renewable" - concerns the issue of critical materials, relatively rare elements which for which only limited supplies are possible without huge environmental costs.
(If this sounds like the "peak oil" fad that was under discussion some years ago, and seems discredited now, it actually is. The failure to run out oil before we ran out space to put it's chief waste, carbon dioxide, is not actually as benign as some people may think. The increase in oil production owes to ratcheting up the already unbearable environmental cost of petroleum (and gas) mining.
Cars are a disaster; it doesn't matter whether their electric cars, gasoline cars, diesel cars, or gas turbine cars. They have not been, are not, and never will be sustainable, and the cultural assumption that their use is essential a crime against all future generations.
An interesting paper appears in the current issue of Environmental Science and Technology, one of the world's premier scientific journals relating to environmental issues.
Here's a link to the paper: Stocks, Flows, and Distribution of Critical Metals in Embedded Electronics in Passenger Vehicles (Environ. Sci. Technol., 2017, 51 (3), pp 1129–1139).
Some excerpts from the introduction:
One of the major applications of critical metals (CMs) is in electrical and electronic equipment (EEE),(1, 4) which is at the same time increasingly embedded in other products, notably automobiles.(5-9) Currently, embedded automotive electronics account on average for 30% of the total car cost (this percentage is expected to increase to 50% in 2030)(8) and already 15–25% of the global neodymium–iron-boron (NdFeB) permanent magnet production is used for automotive electronic applications.(7) It can therefore be expected that the amounts of CMs in end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) increase dramatically in the coming years.
Recycling emerges as a key strategy to ensure future access to CMs.(1) However, current treatment of ELVs favors the recycling of bulk metals like iron, aluminum and copper while most CMs end up in the automobile shredder residue (ASR) from which they are currently not recycled.(10)
...not currently recycled...
One of the fun things one hears when one points out that things like wind turbines and solar cells require critical materials is a kind of glib hand waving comment, "they could be recycled."
But they aren't recycled now. This represents, like the entire "renewables will save us" conceit, a rather selfish claim that future generations will do what we don't do ourselves. This, of course, comes at a time when the current generation is doing everything in its power to see that all future generations are left with almost no resources, a destabilized atmosphere, and a toxic mess.
Here is a nice graphic from the paper, talking about what kinds of critical materials are found in various types of cars:
Recycling of critical materials has a profound energy, thermodyanmic, and thus environmental cost.
It's an interesting read. It may be behind a firewall, but one can generally access it in a good university library.
Just a brief note.
Have a nice day tomorrow.
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