Electric cars aren't as green as the brochure says

The electric car arrives with a clean conscience built in. Zero tailpipe, zero emissions, a small green leaf on the badge. It is a lovely story, and it leaves out almost everything that happens before the car reaches the showroom and after its battery is worn out. We do not think electric cars are the environmental answer they are sold as. We think they are the latest way to sell you something new that makes you feel good about buying it.

The debt it is born with

Before an electric car turns a wheel, it has already put more carbon into the air than a petrol car. The battery is the reason. Mining, refining and assembling hundreds of kilograms of lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite and copper is heavy industry, and it runs largely on fossil fuel.

You do not have to take a critic's word for this. Take the carmaker's. Volvo published a full life-cycle assessment of its electric C40 Recharge, and found that materials, battery production and manufacturing resulted in nearly 70 per cent higher greenhouse gas emissions than a petrol XC40 before either car had been driven.

Then the electric car has to pay that debt back through the power it charges from. On the global electricity mix, Volvo's own figures put the break-even point at 110,000 km. Charged purely on wind power, it falls to 49,000 km. The difference between those two numbers is the whole argument: an electric car is only as clean as the grid behind it.

The grid behind the plug

In Australia, that grid still burns a lot of coal. The federal government's own statistics put coal at 42.7 per cent of Australia's electricity generation in 2025, with fossil fuels as a whole at 60.5 per cent. Renewables are growing fast, and that is genuinely good news. But an Australian electric car charged at home in the evening is not charging on the wind-only number in a brochure. It is charging on whatever the grid is burning that night.

Most drivers never see any of this. The dashboard shows zero emissions. The power station that made the electricity is a long way out of sight.

Who digs it up

The metals have to come from somewhere, and a great deal of the cobalt comes from one place. The US Geological Survey reports that the Democratic Republic of the Congo accounted for 74 per cent of world cobalt mine production in its 2024 summary. Much of it is dug by hand.

In 2016 Amnesty International published This is what we die for, tracing cobalt from artisanal mines where children as young as seven and adults worked in dangerous conditions, with basic hand tools and without protective equipment, into the supply chains of battery makers selling to technology and car companies. Amnesty named carmakers including Daimler and Volkswagen among the downstream companies it wrote to.

Carmakers have since made commitments on responsible sourcing, and some battery chemistries use little or no cobalt. We welcome both. But when a clean car depends on children breaking rocks in a poor country, we think "zero emissions" is not the phrase to put on the badge. Call it what it is: work that comes close to slave labour, in conditions no Australian would ever accept, done so that someone on the other side of the world can feel good at the charger.

Where the battery goes

The brochure is silent on the other end of the battery's life, too. A worn-out traction battery is hundreds of kilograms of chemistry that has to go somewhere.

Recycling it is hard and expensive, and in Australia it barely happens. CSIRO found that only 10 per cent of Australia's lithium-ion battery waste was recycled in 2021, against 99 per cent for lead-acid batteries, the humble 12-volt in a petrol car. CSIRO also warns that with very little local processing capacity, large volumes of lithium batteries sit in warehouses and scrap yards, creating fire risk and potential for environmental contamination.

Ten per cent is close enough to nothing to make the point. The industry says the recycling will come as volumes grow, and it may. Today, the honest answer to "where does my battery end up?" is: nobody can promise you.

What is not in the brochure

Put it together and the marketing leaves out a lot:

• the extra carbon spent building the car, which Volvo puts at nearly 70 per cent more than a petrol equivalent;
• the tens of thousands of kilometres it takes to pay that back, and more on a coal-heavy grid;
• the mines, and the people in them;
• the fact that most spent lithium batteries in Australia are not recycled.

None of those appear next to the green leaf.

The greenest car is often the one you already have

If the real environmental cost of a car is paid when it is built, then building fewer new cars is what helps. That is the part no sales campaign will ever tell you, because there is nothing in it to sell. Keeping a good used car running, driving it sensibly and servicing it well spends none of that manufacturing carbon again.

Buy an electric car if you love driving one, and plenty of people do. Just do not let anyone tell you it wipes your slate clean. It is a new car with a very good marketing department.

Header photo: The International Institute for Environment and Development, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.