Making electric cars cleaner across the board
Electric cars are actually cleaner in use (provided a green ‘electricity mix’ is used) than fuel cars, but production is sometimes much more polluting. The European Union wants to see this change.
An electric car does not emit any emissions while driving, but because the production process of battery packs and the generation of power generate emissions, there is still pollution. In order to make the production process ‘cleaner’ in any case, the European Union is coming up with new rules.
Basically, companies wanting to sell batteries in the EU need to map the carbon footprint of the entire process, from mining to recycling. This information is used to determine maximum permitted emissions from the process, so that companies are more or less forced to use sustainable energy, for example. Furthermore, suppliers of battery cells for battery packs must comply with regulations regarding environmental pollution, working conditions and human rights.
Not only the production of batteries, but also their recycling can have (too much) a negative impact on the environment and climate. The rules for the collection and reuse of raw materials are therefore also being tightened. Consumer batteries must contain certain amounts of recovered nickel, cobalt and lithium. At the moment, the car industry can generally reuse more than half of all material, but that needs to be improved. The EU also wants at least 73 percent of batteries to be collected by 2030. For the battery packs of electric cars, that is 100 percent.
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– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl