Batteries and Environmental Justice

This piece was co-authored by Andrea Marpillero-Colomina, Sustainable Communities Program Director of GreenLatinos / Raquel Dominguez, Circular Economy Policy Advocate at Earthworks

The furthest point upstream in the battery supply chain is the point of extraction—usually hardrock mining for energy transition minerals (ETMs). These are sometimes called critical minerals and include minerals like lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite. As demand for electric vehicles grows, so does demand for these minerals. 

A particularly concerning aspect of the projected boom in ETM extraction is the potential impact on Indigenous Peoples across the globe: of the 5,097 current and future ETM projects, 54% are on Indigenous Peoples’ lands. (It should be noted that these 5,097 projects represent “known ETM deposits where investment was committed towards either defining the orebody or mining development”.) Extraction of any kind near Indigenous communities is strongly correlated with increased rates of gender-based violence, including sexual violence, harassment, murder and trafficking, as well as substance abuse. 

We should bear in mind that Indigenous Peoples steward 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity, which is crucial to ecosystem stability in our rapidly changing climate. For these reasons, governments should require mining operators to earn Indigenous Peoples’ free, prior and informed consent (FPIC), as required by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the International Labor Organization Convention 169. On the domestic front, the law governing hardrock extraction on U.S. federal lands was written specifically to incentivize colonization and settlement of what’s now the American West, meaning it was designed to displace Indigenous Peoples from the lands they had lived on and stewarded for tens of thousands of years. It has not been meaningfully updated since it was enacted in 1872, including its lack of royalty and bonding requirements, as well as community consultation. Courts have ruled that mining is the highest and best land use, meaning that any other use—whether it’s religious or cultural purposes, recreation or renewable energy, are deprioritized in favor of more extraction. 

Lithium mining processes use huge quantities of water and produce mineral waste that can destroy the potability of water, leaving local communities and wildlife without the water sources upon which they rely and potentially poisoning them, often in regions where water access is already scarce (such as the Atacama desert region in Chile). In many cases, mining places resource strains on communities that are already disproportionately burdened by environmental stressors and harms.    

Mining and minerals processing produces about 17% of all GHG emissions and 24% of global pollution, according to the United Nations Environment Program. For every ton of lithium mined, 15 tons of CO₂ are emitted into the air, and much of the energy used to extract lithium and other minerals comes from burning fossil fuels, which in turn pollutes communities and contributes to rising global temperatures, which impacts vulnerable communities with more severity.

For these reasons, the only just and equitable way to transition away from fossil fuels is to do so with as little mining as possible—and ensure that where it is done, it is done with the highest attention to human rights, Indigenous sovereignty, and labor, community and environmental protections. Environmental and climate justice must be the paramount concern as the United States transitions away from a fossil-fuel-based economy, so as not to perpetuate the systems of oppression constructed by the fossil fuel industry. 

To take just one example: In Nevada, land home to the sacred Indigenous landscape Peehee Mu’huh (Thacker Pass) has been found to have the largest lithium deposit in the country. The Biden administration has supported plans to build a new mine at the site as part of efforts to ramp up domestic battery production.

But the local community is fighting back: Atsa Koodakuh wyh Nuwu, the People of Red Mountain in English, a group comprised of Fort McDermitt Paiute, Shoshone and Bannock Tribes and allies, are working to protect their ancestral homelands from the destructive effects of mining. So far they have not been successful. In November 2023, a federal judge ruled against tribes who filed claims to prevent the mine from being built due to its location and the potential harm to their communities and wildlife. The judge denied the tribes’ request for an injunction. As of July 2024, the mine’s current construction is entirely permitted. The second phase, which would take place below the water table, only has water permits from the state of Nevada but does have all the requisite permits from the federal government and is expected to move forward. 

The Biden administration’s support of the mine at Thacker Pass is diametrically opposed to its commitment to “elevating Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (ITEK) in federal scientific and policy processes.” Neither a just transition nor any meaningful climate action are possible if Indigenous Peoples continue to be denied decision-making power over their lands and communities. 

There are solutions to the climate crisis that do not necessitate increasing non-consensual extraction on Indigenous lands. To that end, we must look ahead to circular economy policies that keep already-extracted minerals in use for as long as possible, in order to reduce the need for more extraction or disposal processes. These policies include recycling, the set of processes that removes minerals from batteries that have been used for many decades, throughout many lifetimes, so they can be used in a new battery. Relying on recycling and other circular economy strategies is necessary to design a renewable-energy-based economy with frontline community health, safety and wellbeing in mind. 

All types of recycling are not created equal

A later post will go into the minutiae of battery recycling itself, but suffice to say that there are two broad processes: pyrometallurgy and direct. Pyrometallurgy, also known as incineration or combustion, involves using a huge amount of energy to set batteries on fire and collect their remains. Because of the amount of emissions it produces and low quality of recycled materials, it is not a viable option for promoting climate action or circular economy policies. 

According to the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), hydrometallurgical recycling, which was previously treated as a separate type of battery recycling, should instead be classified as a type of pyrometallurgical recycling. Hydrometallurgical recycling uses chemically treated water to separate minerals after the batteries are broken apart. This technique uses much less energy and produces far fewer hazardous emissions than traditional pyrometallurgy, but it does require some amount of pyrometallurgical processes. Any hydrometallurgical recycling must have extremely high environmental and labor standards to ensure workers and freshwater resources are not harmed in the effort to reduce the demand for extraction. It is currently the option most prepared to be aggressively expanded in the effort to reduce primary mineral extraction, but hopefully direct recycling (see below) will replace hydrometallurgy as the least-harmful battery recycling process in the near future. 

Direct recycling, still largely in the R&D or pilot project stage, is currently the least harmful way to recycle batteries and could potentially be the lowest-impact option for recycling. It relies much more on dismantling and disassembly than the other types of recycling, though we still have some concerns about pretreatment (often shredding or crushing spent batteries) like pyrometallurgy (heating to high temperatures to extract metals) and hydrometallurgy (using water to extract metals). Battery recycling science is moving very quickly right now and getting a lot of private and public funding, and as new processes and technologies begin to develop, it is important that recycling and other extraction reduction advocates only promote types of recycling that meet high environmental and labor standards. 

As battery recycling science continues to develop, and as the conversation around expanding battery recycling continues to grow, we must not lose sight of its place in the circular economy hierarchy. Recycling is an extremely important component of responsible mineral and battery disposal, but a battery should only be recycled once, when its minerals can no longer be used—this would be after more than one life and multiple decades in use in things like stationary storage. To that end, recycling should be deployed at the same pace as other circular economy strategies, including reuse, designing for disassembly and remanufacture, and most importantly, demand reduction. 

We have a rare opportunity to affect change on a massive scale—from one deeply entrenched energy system to a more responsibly sourced, longer-lasting one. Doing this well requires understanding harms caused by even well-intentioned processes like recycling and correcting for those harms during the build-out. 

This post is the second in a series about battery recycling and how to rapidly scale it up in the safest, most responsible way so that the transition away from fossil fuels does not replicate the harms of the fossil fuel-based system. The first post, on the fundamentals of a circular economy for battery minerals, can be found here. We hope this blog series gives advocates a better understanding of the opportunities and harms recycling can provide, with the intent to integrate our concerns into this transition.