EV Batteries — Better Than Their Reputation

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When you buy an EV, it doesn't take long. Someone will explain to you that the lithium in your battery is mined under catastrophic conditions. That landscapes are destroyed. That it's actually no better than oil.

Interestingly, the same person has no problem buying a new smartphone every two years. That contains lithium too. Granted, far less — a phone battery holds maybe 15 watt-hours, an EV battery 50,000 to 100,000. That's a factor of a few thousand. But the underlying outrage is selective, and that says more about the motivation than about the raw material.

What actually happens during lithium mining?

Lithium is mined mainly in two ways: from hard rock (Australia, mostly spodumene ore) and from brine in salt lakes (South America — Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, the so-called "lithium triangle").

The brine process is what shows up in the documentaries: huge evaporation pools in the desert where lithium-rich saltwater evaporates over months. The frequently cited number of 1.9 million litres of water per tonne of lithium needs unpacking — you have to distinguish between brine (undrinkable for humans) and freshwater (used to wash the plants, critical for the local population). A study by the Argentine foundation FARN documented that two mining companies in the Salar region withdrew around 3.7 billion litres of freshwater in 2023 — 31 times the annual consumption of the Susques community.

That's real. That's a problem. In the meantime, though, a lot has changed: Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) has been scaled industrially in 2024 and 2025 — Eramet in Argentina, Rio Tinto in Salta. These plants no longer evaporate the brine; they extract the lithium selectively and reinject the brine. Freshwater consumption is below 50 m³ per tonne of lithium carbonate equivalent. The evaporation pools are yesterday's standard, not 2026's.

But fine — let's look at what happens with other raw materials.

Cobalt: Child labour and hand-mining hundreds of metres deep

Cobalt sits in many lithium-ion batteries — in the NMC variant (nickel-manganese-cobalt), which was the standard for a long time. Since 2024, however, LFP (lithium iron phosphate) has overtaken NMC: more than half of all new EV batteries are cobalt-free. NMC is now a premium niche — but a broad one: all German premium EVs (BMW iX3, Mercedes EQS, Porsche Taycan) and also Tesla Long Range still use cobalt cells. And in our smartphones you'll find Lithium Cobalt Oxide (LCO) — the most cobalt-heavy chemistry of all, with around 60 percent cobalt in the cathode material. Most of this cobalt comes from a single region.

Around 55 to 60 percent of the world's cobalt reserves lie in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the DRC accounts for roughly 76 percent of production (USGS 2025). Artisanal mining concentrates on the province of Lualaba around Kolwezi — which used to belong to the larger province of Katanga, which has not existed since the administrative reform of 2015.

There, around 100,000 people dig with hand tools up to hundreds of metres deep into the ground. Without planning, without safety equipment. The Washington Post has documented it. UNICEF has documented it. In 2019 International Rights Advocates filed the "Doe v. Apple" lawsuit against Apple, Tesla, Dell, Microsoft and Google — for "knowingly aiding and abetting the use of young children" in cobalt mining. In 2024 the DC Circuit Court confirmed the dismissal, and the Supreme Court denied the cert petition. The case is now definitively over in the US.

The book "Cobalt Red" by Siddharth Kara documents injuries, amputations and deaths. Compared to that, lithium mining — with all its problems — is in a different league.

Rare earths: 200 million tonnes of toxic sludge

Rare earths are needed for magnets in wind turbines and electric motors. The world's largest mine sits in Bayan Obo, China. What happens there makes lithium mining look like gardening.

Per tonne of rare earths, about 2,000 tonnes of waste are produced, part of which is radioactive — because of the thorium in the ores. The Weikuang tailings dam near Baotou contains around 200 million tonnes of sludge, with an estimated 70,000 tonnes of thorium bound in it. The groundwater is contaminated. Residents have significantly elevated rare-earth levels in their blood, urine and bones.

Almost no one talks about rare earths. The documentaries prefer to hit the lithium button.

Copper: The silent catastrophe

Copper is everywhere — in cables, wiring, electronics. Mining leaves huge open pits (the Chino Mine in New Mexico is a striking example), acid mine drainage that poisons entire rivers (the Rio Tinto in Spain is bright orange from heavy metals), and increasing arsenic contamination because the shallow, clean deposits are long exhausted.

At least: copper is well recyclable — the Recycling Input Rate worldwide is over 40 percent. That's more than you can say for many other raw materials. Still, the damage that primary mining has caused for thousands of years is massive and well documented. It just doesn't interest anyone, because copper isn't part of the anti-EV enemy image.

Oil: The industry warming the planet

You could write books about the environmental damage of the oil industry — and books have been written. Deepwater Horizon. The burning oil fields in Kuwait. The Niger Delta disaster (Shell completed the sale of its onshore subsidiary SPDC to Renaissance Africa Energy in 2024, and responsibility for the legacy contamination is currently being renegotiated). The permanent pollution of the oceans. And of course: climate change itself.

But sure, lithium is the problem.

The sodium shift

And now the nice part: we're already moving away from lithium — at least partially.

Sodium-ion batteries are no longer a thing of the future. The JAC Yiwei (model „Huaxianzi") went into mass production in January 2024 with sodium cells from HiNa — the world's first series-production electric car of this kind. CATL, the world's largest battery manufacturer, presented its sodium brand "Naxtra" in April 2025; mass production has been running since December 2025. The cells delivered in the volume segment are around 150–160 watt-hours per kilogram, and the premium cell for passenger cars is targeting 175 Wh/kg — approaching the values of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries.

Why does this matter? Three reasons:

First: sodium is everywhere. In the Earth's crust, sodium is about 1,150 times more abundant than lithium. In seawater, around 60,000 times. There's no supply problem. No "sodium triangle", no geopolitical dependency.

Second: no cobalt, no nickel needed. Sodium-ion batteries can be built with iron-based materials. That eliminates the worst supply-chain problems in one stroke.

Third: better in the cold. Sodium-ion batteries retain around 90 percent of their capacity at minus 20 degrees — a range where lithium batteries collapse significantly. Below that, sodium also loses power noticeably, but even this reserve makes a real difference for Scandinavia, Canada or Mongolia.

What's left

Anyone who demonises lithium but fills up a petrol car, lays copper cables and carries a smartphone with a cobalt battery in their pocket doesn't have an environmental problem. They have an EV problem.

And even the cobalt question is dissolving itself: LFP — practically cobalt-free — has long overtaken NMC. Sodium is hanging on its heels and getting ready to overtake them both.

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