Salty Batteries and Recycling Plastic Poison

First the good news:

Keith Bradsher in the New York Times reported on April 12, 2023 that China is developing batteries based on sodium instead of lithium. Scientists in Changsha, China are working with Germany’s BASF and other companies. Lithium is relatively scarce, and so it is expensive, and it has to be mined and sourced. Sodium is abundant. It is in table salt, the oceans, and salt flats in many locations. It costs between 1-3% as much as lithium. These batteries also keep their charge much better than lithium batteries in below freezing temperatures. And they can be made with much of the same technology used for lithium batteries, so re-tooling isn’t a major obstacle.

The sodium batteries are larger than lithium batteries, so may not be useful for transportation, like electric vehicles. But while they may have some, if limited, use for vehicles, there are other potentially very important uses. The article reports:

“At next week’s Shanghai auto show, carmakers and battery producers are expected to announce plans for sodium batteries in at least some limited-range subcompact cars for the Chinese market.

The most immediately promising use for sodium batteries is for electric grids, the networks of wires and towers that transmit electricity.”

This would make solar and wind much more useful, a real game changer. Fingers crossed!

Now, the not so good news:

It may seem like a dream to recycle plastic. It can be done in some cases, but there are many technical difficulties: the additives in plastics are often toxic and the energy involved can be enormous and create more greenhouse gases!

There is the risk of it being another form of greenwashing: making it seem like plastic isn’t an issue, we can continue with business as usual. Which business? Oil and gas. Plastic is a fossil fuel product that oil companies are hoping will get them through with continued income as we electrify the world more and more with renewable energy and use less fossil fuels in order to survive and thrive.  

Cases in point: Chevron and ExxonMobil. As reported in The Guardian and ProPublica,there are issues with a Chevron refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi that the EPA approved for a plastic-based fuel that can leave people near the refinery with a one-in-four risk of cancer.  A lawsuit was brought by the Pascagoula Cherokee Forest subdivision that is near the plant.  The article points out “that high lifetime cancer risk was the EPA’s own calculation and was detailed in a final consent order that was signed by a manager at Chevron’s Pascagoula refinery and the director of EPA’s new chemicals division.”

The EPA says this 25% risk of cancer was a high estimate, not necessarily the most likely outcome. But it is within the realm of possible! So, would one in ten be OK?

Chevron disputes the risks. Of course, oil companies do have a vested interest that has a long history of denying the truth and twisting and downplaying the facts.

There are social justice issues. These plants are not in wealthy suburbs. The article states:  

“Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, told the EPA administrator, Michael Regan, in a letter sent on Wednesday that he found what ProPublica and the Guardian discovered ‘especially troubling.’

‘While it is urgent that our country takes actions to address climate chaos we need to ensure that the steps we take actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions and do not do so by sacrificing historically marginalized communities and those who are already overburdened by toxic pollution,’ Merkley wrote.”

In the article they point out that ProPublica and The Guardian had previously noted that “making fuel from plastic is in some ways worse for the climate than simply creating it directly from coal, oil or gas. That’s because nearly all plastic is derived from fossil fuels, and additional fossil fuels are used to generate the heat that turns discarded plastic into fuels.”

In a related story ExxonMobil added plastic recycling to its Baytown Texas plant. As The Guardian reports:

 “An ‘advanced recycling’ facility capable of breaking down 36,000 metric tons of hard-to-recycle plastic each year. But plastic waste advocates warn that plants like it do little actual recycling, and instead generate hazardous pollutants while providing cover for oil giants to keep producing millions of tons of new plastic products each year.”

The article goes on to say:

 “In 2021 alone, ExxonMobil churned out 6m tons of new single-use plastic, more than any other petrochemical company, according to a recent report by the philanthropic Minderoo Foundation. What’s more, recent research has shown that chemical recycling is worse for the environment than mechanical recycling in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and water use, and in some cases, worse than virgin plastic production. The process ExxonMobil’s Baytown plant uses, called pyrolysis, is often so inefficient that many environmental advocates say it should not be called recycling at all….”

“While pyrolysis is able to handle more types of plastic waste than some other chemical recycling technologies, Uekert said it is not typically considered ‘closed loop’ recycling because the fuel it generates is often burned for energy – meaning it can’t be recycled again and again.”

There are also issues of using a lot of energy and water, and generating other toxic waste.

This is a way to deflect attention and create profits for ExxonMobil. As the article says:

“Chemical recycling is ‘deflecting attention away from what we need, which is reducing single-use plastics and a global treaty on plastic waste’, said Phaedra Pezzullo, a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.” 

Remember: an ounce of protection is worth a pound of cure. Using less plastic, particularly single use plastic,  is a better solution, as is making plastic less toxic and able to be mechanically recycled without these toxic technologies.