Clean energy transition must be transformative

Private companies, fund managers, and policymakers are set to meet in the Asian Development Bank’s annual Asia Clean Energy Forum in the first week of June with the theme “Accelerating the Clean Energy Transition and Ensuring Energy Security and Affordability—Time for Urgent Action Now.” The forum, which unfortunately has been defined in recent years with increasing endorsements of dirty solutions, is happening against the backdrop of possibly the hottest World Environment Day in recent memory.

The United Nations’ (UN) progress report on the Paris Agreement found that urgent global actions are not on track to meet climate targets by 2050, suggesting that cleaner technologies and financing would need to be rapidly deployed. Civil society, however, has pointed out that a transition of such a scale is dangerous, especially to communities most vulnerable to top-down energy shifts.

The rushed transition can be seen in the mad push to electrify the transport sector. To meet global climate targets, at least 30 times as much lithium, nickel, and other key minerals may be required by the electric vehicle (EV) industry by 2040, according to International Energy Agency scenarios. Projections like this imply the need for further mining in currently protected areas or currently affected mining communities to meet this need.

Governments and a few businesses are banking on the recyclability of EV batteries, the 1,000-pound heart of an EV to offset this mineral demand, but also as a way to create value out of second-life applications such as refurbished batteries, and even power banks. Batteries are mineral-intensive, toxic, and don’t last forever. The first generation of EV batteries—around 1.2 million units—will reach their peak by 2030, ballooning up to 14 million by 2040, and 50 million by 2050. Once batteries dip below 70 to 80 percent efficiency after 10 to 20 years, or hardware failure, they are considered spent and removed from the vehicle. At this point, they need to be assessed for reuse, repurposing, or recycling. Most proposed pathways for spent lithium-ion EV battery recycling today are not proven to work at scale yet; they are also energy-intensive with low material recovery rates and pose toxic emissions to make and recycle.

Today only an estimated 5 percent of EV batteries are said to be recycled, with most ending up in landfills and posing continuing threats such as fires, toxic effusion, and land and water contamination. Battery design choices, chemistries, and unproven technical and economic viability to reduce primary mineral demand mean EV battery recycling remains unviable.

The Asia Pacific region has been the predominant market for two- and three-wheeled EVs that use older lead-acid batteries primarily for their efficiency and affordability in the face of increasing fuel prices. Led on by the lack of policies and infrastructure on what to do with battery waste, informal economic activities have begun to take root such as battery swapping, and scrap selling by waste picker groups including dangerous waste disposal options such as waste incineration.

In Manila, waste picker groups understand the need to transition. But as frontlines of managing battery wastes, they are wary of chemical burns from disassembly, unfair market-pricing practices, community hazards from lack of publicly assigned storage spaces in densely packed settlements, and even deaths due to electrocution from extracting high-value metals such as copper to sell. What will happen once the batteries start piling up and how the implementation gap will inevitably result in the informal sector catching all the slack? And there’s the rub: All these projections for mineral demand and batteries are premised on exponential production and consumerism. The question then becomes: Is the world’s obsession with net-zero targets simply shifting from one source of energy to another without addressing the needed transformative systems shifts?

The waste pickers of Manila should give us pause, not only because they have demonstrated an acute awareness of what needs to happen for a just transition to take place, but also because it is groups like theirs that are routinely excluded in global climate policy discussions.

Rapid decarbonization without accounting for the environmental and social costs of this massive shift will multiply inequalities, and any push to hasten the transition cannot be at the cost of replicating the structures that put us in the climate crisis. As UN Environment Programme executive director Inger Andersen puts it, “This must go beyond merely adding seats at a table—a transformation is required toward more networked and better-connected decision-making that breaks boundaries and legitimizes meaningful representation.”

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Mayang Azurin is deputy director for GAIA Asia Pacific, a global network to catalyze a global shift toward environmental justice by strengthening grassroots social movements that advance solutions to waste and pollution. Aileen Lucero is national coordinator for EcoWaste Coalition, a Philippine member of GAIA AP, a public interest and advocacy network of more than 150 community, church, school, environmental, and health groups in the Philippines.