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LITHIUM-ION BATTERIES POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE RIGHTS IMPACTS ANDY SYMINGTON Andy Symington is a PhD candidate at UNSW Law, an Associate of the Australian Human Rights Institute, and a guest editor on this issue. Andy tweets @andysymington
It is becoming increasingly apparent that the potential impacts of climate change make it not only an enormous environmental and political challenge, but also the defining human rights issue of this century. Minimising planetary warming and avoiding or mitigating its worst effects are crucial to ensuring that the ability of whole segments of global society to enjoy numerous rights is not severely curtailed. In many ways, the battle against climate change should be seen not just as a fight for rights but as a struggle for the feasibility of the very concept of human rights as we currently understand it.
Within this struggle, the specific case of the lithium-ion battery is an intriguing one: this technology has enormous positive rights potential, but current production methods involve serious negative impacts. Lithium-ion batteries, ubiquitous in smartphones and other consumer electronics, are also what power the new generation of electric vehicles. Additionally, they are our principal means of storage of renewable energy: Elon Musk’s much-hyped installation for the South Australian government in 2017 was an example of the technology’s ground-breaking capabilities. As such, lithium-ion batteries are currently key to the moving away from fossil fuels, but their manufacture is also associated with a series of worrying human rights impacts that pose a challenge to extractive companies, battery producers and vehicle makers. HOW IT WORKS There are various types of lithium-ion batteries but the basic configuration is of two electrodes immersed in a lithium salt solution. The negative electrode (anode) is usually made of graphite, while its counterpart cathode is
HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDER | VOLUME 28: ISSUE 1 – MAY 2019
typically made from a lithium oxide combined with other metals. Different cathode materials give distinct combinations of performance, safety, weight and cost. The configuration generally used for electric vehicles – which sport an array of several thousand batteries – has a cathode containing lithium, nickel, cobalt and either manganese or aluminium. There are serious human rights concerns associated with the extraction of several of these metals as well as with the production of graphite for the anode. GRAPHITE An extended Washington Post investigation into the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries highlighted that, in China, this ‘clean technology’ was produced via ‘oldfashioned industrial pollution’ from graphite factories.1 Refining mined graphite carpets local communities in sooty particles, polluting local water supplies, damaging food sources and endangering health. The heavy use of acid in the process causes further environmental damage. While synthetic graphite and an acid-free method of processing mined graphite are available, lower production costs of the pollution-heavy method2 means that it predominates. As graphite is the largest single component of lithium-ion batteries, and electric vehicle makers are under pressure to produce cars at consumer-friendly prices, this presents a major business human rights challenge to companies right through the supply chain. LITHIUM Lithium is mined in many countries across the world, but it is another form of extraction that is causing particular alarm. High in the Andes of Chile and Argentina, companies pump enormous quantities of brine from beneath the surface of vast salt pans. The water is then evaporated off over the course of a year or so, leaving a lithium-rich sludge that can be refined. The region is an
