The Industrial Ecology of Lead and Electric Vehicles

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Summary: The lead battery has the potential to become one of the first examples of a hazardous product managed in an environmentally acceptable fashion. The tools of industrial ecology are helpful in identifying the key criteria that an ideal lead‐battery recycling system must meet maximal recovery of batteries after use, minimal export of used batteries to countries where environmental controls are weak, minimal impact on the health of communities near lead‐processing facilities, and maximal worker protection from lead exposure in these facilities. A well‐known risk analysis of electric vehicles is misguided, because it treats lead batteries and lead additives in gasoline on the same footing and implies that the lead battery should be abandoned. The use of lead additives in gasoline is a dissipative use where emissions cannot be confined: the goal of management should be and has been to phase out this use. The use of lead in batteries is a recyclable use, because the lead remains confined during cycles of discharge and recharge. Here, the goal should be clean recycling. The likelihood that the lead battery will provide peaking power for several kinds of hybrid vehicles‐a role only recently identified increases the importance of understanding the levels of performance achieved and achievable in battery recycling. A management system closely approaching clean recycling should be achievable.

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