Bad Dad and I were featured in A Local Travel Network for the South Bay Story Map* riding my Ebike and an Escooter we bought for combining with transit just before the March 2020 lockdown.
Sunday, April 04, 2021
LTN: One possible solution to decarbonizing transportation
Friday, April 02, 2021
Batteries don't grow on trees
Highlights
- The life cycle assessment of the cobalt extraction route is carried out.
- Blasting and electricity consumption in cobalt mining is damaging to the environment.
- Eutrophication and global warming are the most affected impact categories.
- Carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide emission are highest from cobalt mining.
- Alternative energy sources for electricity generation would enhance sustainability.
Further reading:
Monday, March 29, 2021
Plastic
I vent sometimes on Twitter. Earlier this month, I ran a Twitter poll and learned how hard it is to write an unambiguous multiple choice question.
Is plastic petroleum?
Of the 164 votes,
- 72.6% chose "Yes, duh"
- 3% chose "No"
- 4.3% chose "Don't know"
- 20.1% chose "Not enough info to answer"
I started to write an explanation for the answer, but it became quite a long thread. Since it took so much research and time, it deserves to be put up on the blog.
Until 2 years ago, I didn’t know that materials scientists consider plastic a property instead of a material. You can make plastic from all sorts of polymers that are soft when warm and rigid when cooled. Eg potato starch plastic. 2/THE DYSFUNCTION OF PLASTICS RECYCLING Plastics recycling, as it exists today, is a mess. In 2015, the US recycled only 9.1% of the 31 million t of plastics that consumers threw out, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The vast majority ended up in either landfills or incinerators. In contrast, two-thirds of paper, a third of metals, and a quarter of glass were recycled that year. In the European Union, about 14.8% of the roughly 27 million t of plastic waste was recycled in 2016, according to the European Commission.But, there's active research into using enzymes to break down plastic back to its pre-polymerized raw feedstock shape. About 40% of it will remain, but it can be turned into low-sulfur diesel fuel--not a bad fuel for long distance trucking or ocean-going cargo ships which operate away from urban areas.
Tackling the climate and air pollution crises requires curbing all motorised transport, particularly private cars, as quickly as possible. Focusing solely on electric vehicles is slowing down the race to zero emissions.
Friday, February 12, 2021
Battery Pile-up
I'm usually an EV (electric car) pessimist, but a couple of things make me hopeful.
You can set lofty goals in the future, but stymie real and substantive changes today. I see that at all levels of California governance. E.g. you can put an electric car charger on the sidewalk of a downtown LA street, which precludes installing a bike lane later. I walked by the charger below and lamented the lost opportunity.
But, LA actually installed a 'parking protected' bike lane right there, and a bicyclist flipped off his bike one night when he ran into the cable in the dark. He posted a photo of what he saw in the dark on Twitter. It went viral. See the staged photo below, which highlights the black cable in orange.
Notice the narrow width of the bike lane to accommodate private car storage on a downtown LA street. I may not be a Climate Mayor, but even I know that using streets to move people rather than store private property is a better use of public space. Don't @ me about customers arriving in cars. People spend money. Cars do not. In fact, providing car parking is a huge expense for business owners and society in general.
There are lots of parking garages in DTLA and our family even uses them sometimes. But I mainly use transit to get to and around DTLA because it's too crowded to do otherwise.
When I realized that we used our minivan mainly for getting to the light rail station and our annual road trip, we decided to replace it with a folding electric scooter (for coupling with transit) and occasional car rental. I already had an eBike, and used it for most of my local Beach Cities and West Torrance trips. If our area had better bike facilities, I could travel even further. Sigh.
Electric cars (what most people refer to as EVs) are very popular in the Beach Cities. But, I think we should also accommodate smaller electric vehicles, such as my 0.3 kiloWatt-hour scooter and 0.5 kWh eBike. In contrast, the very popular (in our area) Tesla X has 100 kWh batteries.
Batteries are so toxic, resource-intensive and sourcing their raw materials are so problematic environmentally and socially, I won't go into it here. It just makes sense to move people around in the smallest package necessary with the least amount of batteries.
But, that's not how we're behaving. It makes no sense to celebrate replacing 4000 pound ICE cars with 5000 pound EVs while not simultaneously working as fast as we can to get people out of cars in the cities.
What will we do with the growing pile of spend batteries? Until recently, they were just piling up dangerously. Some were sent overseas to poorer countries, that stockpiled or recycled them in (sometimes unsafe ways, especially for their workers). That is not a long-term solution.
Available Li-ion battery recycling facilities are few and expensive. Until recently, there were only three in all of North America. Furthermore, it would cost ~$91,500 to recycle one MegaWatt-hour (MWh) of Li-ion batteries. A Tesla X has 100kWh or 0.1 MWh; recycling its batteries would cost ~$9,150. In contrast, my eBike has 1/200th the batteries and my scooter has 1/300th the batteries. I can also travel about 40 miles by eBike on the same electricity that moves a Tesla 1 mile.
Ideally, spent batteries should be circular and recycled into new batteries. While lead-acid batteries are circular, the Exide and Quemetco battery recycling plants in LA County were not good environmental neighbors. There are limited ways to recycle batteries--smelting (heating to evaporate away all the non-metals), leaching (repeated acid/water washes to carry away the metals) and physical (electrochemical).
In LA, with our limited water supply, smelting was used. A small fraction of the lead escaped through the smokestacks. (I never understood how that happened if strict emissions control equipment were used, but it did.) A small fraction of a large amount created an awful lot of lead pollution in some of the poorest and densest parts of Los Angeles County.
Would we repeat our lead recycling environmental mistakes with lithium batteries?
Maybe not?
Start with some regulations that force industry to take action, even if it is expensive today:
The new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) on the North American auto industry has a 2030 requirement of 75% locally produced content, and use of recycled battery materials could help North American EV manufacturers achieve that.
Add money and cities willing to host recycling plants:
The Canadian firm Li-Cycle will begin constructing a US $175 million plant in Rochester, N.Y., on the grounds of what used to be the Eastman Kodak complex. When completed, it will be the largest lithium-ion battery-recycling plant in North America.[The articles don't say which process they are using to recycle the batteries. But, I notice that both plants are near large quantities of water.]