Clean power, Complicated costs | CTW 2

Julian Trotzenberg

“More than half the children tested in Ogijo had levels [of lead] that could cause lifelong brain damage,” according to investigative journalists Will Fitzgibbon and Peter Goodman. Ogijo is one of many towns in Africa that has become a recycling site for lithium-ion batteries. Located in Nigeria, near its capital, Lagos, Ogijo has been subjected to inhumane working conditions due to rising demand for lithium-ion and lead-acid batteries to power growing electric vehicle and power grid demand. US manufacturers have started purchasing recycled batteries because they are cheaper, but that lower price tag comes at a human cost. Fitzgibbon and Goodman interviewed Ali Fawaz, the general manager of an environmentally sustainable factory called Green Recycling, who said recycled batteries are “a bad investment unless you’re dirty.” The company is even going out of business because its recycling process is too expensive, and because other facilities utilize child labor or low wages to price out the competition. Without high safety standards, workers develop lead poisoning, which is especially harmful to children because it can lead to learning difficulties, memory loss, developmental delays, organ damage, and, in severe cases, seizures or death. Goodman and Fitzgibbon even stated that “lead poisoning worldwide is estimated to cause far more deaths each year than malaria and HIV/AIDS combined.” Lead is integral to batteries because it enables the storage and release of electricity. While recycling is viewed favorably because it recirculates already manufactured materials, if the process is poisoning children, how sustainable can it be?

Battery production also ravages the environment, despite being the technology intended to facilitate our transition to a renewable future. In an article published in Earth.org, environmental enthusiast Lakshmi R B outlines the damaging effects of battery production due to the water required to manufacture lithium, a key component in lithium-ion batteries. Lakshmi states that “producing one tonne of lithium (enough for ~100 car batteries) requires approximately 2 million tonnes of water,” equating to over 500 million gallons of water, a shocking quantity because it exposes how an integral technology for a sustainable future devours valuable water in places that are already in drought. This effect is primarily hitting Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, which are known as the “Lithium Triangle” because they hold the majority of the world's lithium reserves. According to a paper written by Ahmad Samar in the Harvard International Review, lithium extraction in Chile’s Salar de Atacama has consumed “65 percent of the region’s water supply,” creating “extreme water shortages” and diminishing farmers’ abilities to maintain crops and livestock. In addition to the water cost, Ahmad notes that lithium extraction “harms soil and contaminates the air and the already limited water supply,” while covering “their landscapes in blankets of discarded salt.” Lakshmi R B also provides a sense of scale to the ecosystem damage, stating that Cuba has over 1400 acres of land that are “devoid of life” due to nickel and cobalt production, some of the most important ingredients for batteries. Batteries present a frustrating paradox: they form the backbone of our sustainable energy future, but they damage the environment in ways that are just as devastating as fossil fuels. We are innovating this technology to combat the harm fossil fuels cause to our climate and environment, yet the replacement technology introduces many of the problems we intended to leave behind. 

Nevertheless, despite the environmental costs associated with their production and recycling, batteries have been shown to reduce emissions in the long term. Let's look at electric vehicles, a significant catalyst for battery production uptake in recent years. In an article for RMI, advocate for renewable energy Alessandra Carreon reports that “EV production generally emits more greenhouse gases per car than cars powered by fossil fuels. However, the average EV makes up for this difference in less than two years.” This is one clear benefit of batteries over fossil fuels, as “road transport accounts for 15% of total CO2 emissions,” according to Hannah Ritchie's analysis in Our World In Data. NPR's Camila Domonske sums up this research: “Building a battery is an environmental cost that's paid once. Burning gasoline is a cost that's paid again, and again, and again.” 

However, renewable energy, supported by batteries, is not without risk. In her piece in POWER Magazine, Sonal Patel—an award-winning multimedia journalist—contends that solar and battery technologies are not being integrated quickly enough to offset the loss of natural gas energy production, given the increase in demand from data centers and electrification. Patel claims that well over half of North America is at risk of energy shortages in the coming years. She provides evidence that 115 GW of current energy facilities will be shut down and need to be replaced by new energy generation methods such as solar, wind, hydropower or geothermal over the next decade, which would equate to approximately 10% of the total installed capacity in the U.S. at the end of 2023. That means that one in ten people’s power needs to be replaced by weather-dependent sustainable sources in the next ten years. 

Clean energy relies on batteries to store electricity. As we transition to renewable energy sources, we must reform the systems that produce and recycle them. A major problem lies in ambiguous oversight and transparency across the entire supply chain. According to Alessandra Carreon, “Battery minerals travel an average of 50,000 miles from extraction to battery cell production,” so corporations struggle to track and evaluate the sources from which they’re buying. This distance also prevents governments from holding these corporations accountable for exploitative labor practices. Mandating “battery passports,” a concept outlined by DigiProd Pass, could address this problem. They function as a digital twin for each battery, enabling corporations and governments to determine the battery’s entire history, from where it was sourced to where it is built into a vehicle. While Europe has established a deadline for these passports to be in use in 2027, where manufacturers “must be able to provide ongoing, verifiable lifecycle data — not just one-off reports,” the US is not planning to have a mandate for this. 

Enforcing recycling quotas can be another way to mitigate the environmental damage of batteries. Lakshmi R B writes that “Only 5% of the world’s total batteries are currently recycled,” which is problematic because lead-acid batteries (used in most cars) are nearly 100% recyclable. The bottleneck is that no strict enforcement exists, and that safe and reliable recycling is too expensive. Will Fitzgibbon and Peter Goodman explain that this causes corporations to purchase recycled batteries from towns like Ogijo, where unjust labor laws devastate communities. We need more regulations on how batteries are produced, like the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act mentioned by Carreon, which aimed "to strengthen domestic EV supply chains by requiring critical minerals be extracted or processed in the United States or a Free Trade Agreement country,” in order for these companies to be eligible for certain tax credits. Specifically, corporations can receive $35 per kilowatt-hour for battery cells for domestically produced batteries under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit (Section 45X), according to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. 

My family purchased an electric vehicle and built a house with sustainable features like solar panels and a non-gas heating system. Now I worry that the car's battery and the batteries used to store the solar energy may not have been ethically produced. Must we choose between buying cars that put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and exterminate ecosystems worldwide and supporting factories in which children receive lead poisoning? As a mechanical engineer, I aspire to innovate in the EV industry by making vehicles more efficient, but what’s the point if the innovative technology still destroys the planet? 

Batteries are here to stay, so we, the public, must act to stop the damage caused by their production and recycling. I urge you to reach out to your U.S. Representatives and Senators—in California this would include Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff and Representative Ro Khanna—and tell them to support stricter regulations, like the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, and demand that they mandate battery passports so that we can be in control of our impact and feel confident in the officials and corporations we depend on. We can also support companies that publish detailed and transparent supply chain reports, such as Mercedes, VW, Volvo and Ganfeng Lithium, while also supporting publications that produce superior investigative journalism, such as the NYT, the Atlantic, and the Examination, which will find these injustices and expose them to the public. While a future without fossil fuels will be better for climate change, we must maintain ethical practices as we transition to a clean energy system. A sustainable future must be measured not only by its emissions but also by its ethics.

Works Cited 

Ahmad, Samar. “The Lithium Triangle: Where Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia Meet.” Harvard International Review, 15 Jan. 2020, https://hir.harvard.edu/lithium-triangle/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2026. 

“Battery Passport Deadlines: What Manufacturers Must Do Before 2027.” DigiProdPass, 8 Jan. 2026, https://digiprodpass.com/blogs/battery-passport-deadlines-2027. Accessed 27 Feb. 2026. 

Carreon, Alessandra R. “The EV Battery Supply Chain Explained.” RMI, 5 May 2023, https://rmi.org/the-ev-battery-supply-chain-explained/. Accessed 18 Feb. 2026.

Domonoske, Camila. “Their Batteries Hurt the Environment, but EVs Still Beat Gas Cars. Here’s Why.” NPR, 9 May 2024, www.npr.org/2024/05/09/1250212212/ev-batteries-environmental-impact. Accessed 26 Jan. 2026. 

Fitzgibbon, Will, and Peter S. Goodman. “Recycling Lead for U.S. Car Batteries Is Poisoning People.” The Examination, 18 Nov. 2025, www.theexamination.org/articles/battery-recycling-nigeria-lead-poisoning-us-automakers. Accessed 26 Jan. 2026. 

Patel, Sonal. “Five Critical Insights from NERC’s 2024 Long-Term Reliability Assessment.” POWER Magazine, 19 Dec. 2024, www.powermag.com/five-critical-insights-from-nercs-2024-long-term-reliability-assessment/. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026. 

R. B., Lakshmi. “The Environmental Impact of Battery Production for Electric Vehicles.” Earth.Org, 11 Jan. 2023, earth.org/environmental-impact-of-battery-production/. Accessed 26 Jan. 2026. 

Ritchie, Hannah. “Cars, Planes, Trains: Where Do CO₂ Emissions from Transport Come From?” Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport. Accessed 6 Mar. 2026. 

“The 30D & 45X Tax Credits Explained: What’s at Stake for the U.S. Automotive Industry.” Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, 5 Sept. 2025, www.c2es.org/2025/09/the-30d-45x-tax-credits-explained/.