Hello, welcome to Record High. I’m Kate Yoder, a staff writer at Grist, and today, we’re looking at how sweating can help us cope with climate change.

It is embarrassing to be a sweaty person. I remember making my way to the podium to give a speech at my sixth-grade graduation, my feet squelching audibly in flip-flops with every step; taking a test and noticing the warped paper beneath my moist hand; standing up from a plastic chair and hoping no one noticed the sweaty butt print I left behind. So it came as a relief to learn that sweating was actually good for something. 

Once I learned that the science journalist Sarah Everts wrote a book called The Joy of Sweat, I knew that I had to talk to her. Everts makes the case that perspiration is a human superpower, a gift for enduring sweltering temperatures. “I think it’s funny that humans have this enormous taboo about a biological function that’s ultimately going to help us survive climate change,” she told me.

The science of sweat goes as follows: At the first hint of getting hot, your heart starts pumping blood toward the outskirts of your body. In tandem, sweat glands pump water — drawn from that blood — onto your skin. When those tiny beads evaporate, they move heat off the body and into the air. It’s an incredibly efficient way to cool down. The geneticist Yana Kamberov, who studies the evolution of sweat, told me that the ability to shed buckets of water is an ability as unique to humans as our oversize brains.

So why do we burn through all that water, one of life’s precious resources? To avoid getting cooked from the inside out. “Dying from a heat wave is like a horror movie with 27 endings that you can choose from,” said Camilo Mora, a climate scientist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa, who has cataloged 27 different ways that heat can lead to organ failure and death. 

The thing is, sweating has its limits, as I reported for Grist this week. Very hot, humid conditions can render it ineffective. When the air is thick with water molecules, it’s harder for sweat to evaporate, and the body starts overheating. The theoretical point at which no amount of sweating can help you is thought to be six hours of exposure to a “wet-bulb temperature” of 35 degrees Celsius, or 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Wet-bulb temperature — invented by the U.S. military in the 1950s after recruits kept collapsing from heat illness — is a measurement that combines heat and humidity with sunlight and wind.

But heat gets dangerous long before that point. Last year, a study found that the upper limit of safety for healthy people was a wet-bulb temperature of 31 degrees C, or 88 degrees F. And factors like age, illness, and body size change the math. Older people are especially vulnerable — partly because of health conditions, and partly because sweat glands tend to deteriorate with age.

That humidity poses a problem for sweating is well-known, but I was surprised to learn that the opposite extreme — hot, dry air — could present its own set of problems. Sweat evaporates very quickly in arid conditions, but the human body can only produce a limited amount of sweat, said Ollie Jay, a health professor at the University of Sydney in Australia. That limit is about a liter per hour at rest, or about three liters an hour during exercise. If you managed to reach that point of maximum sweatiness in dry heat, then you wouldn’t be able to sweat enough to cool down. But most climate models ignore this, leading almost certainly to overestimates for what humans can handle, Jay said.

Given how crucial perspiration is for survival, you’d think researchers would have the science of sweat all figured out by now, but there are still open questions. Read the full story here. (Teaser: It includes a robot that sweats.)

By the numbers

Earlier this month, researchers analyzed the hot and humid conditions under which the human body starts to overheat unless specific actions to cool down are taken. They found that under our current climate, 8 percent of the land on Earth will meet this threshold at least once a decade. That would increase to a quarter if global temperatures warm 2 degrees C above the preindustrial average.

Data Visualization by Clayton Aldern

What we’re reading

It’s not only coral in trouble in Florida: Anemones, sponges, and jellyfish — usually resilient creatures — are struggling to survive in the Everglades amid record marine temperatures. “It’s a complete ecosystem problem,” Matt Bellinger, owner and operator of Bamboo Charters in the Keys, told Abigail Geiger and Gabriela Tejeda for their piece in Grist.

Read more

Take a siesta: A midday break with a meal and a nap doesn’t just sound pleasant, it also protects outdoor workers from exposure to the hottest time of day. Grist fellow Siri Chilukuri explains the benefits of reviving the Mediterranean tradition and the challenges of bringing it to the overworked United States.

Read more

The fight for worker safety heats up: After laboring in temperatures up to 118 degrees F, baggage handlers, runway signalers, and cabin cleaners at the Phoenix airport requested an investigation of working conditions they say leave them prone to heat illness and exhaustion. They are the first airport workers to file a complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Grist fellow Katie Myers reports.

Read more

Heat waves and pregnancy are a dangerous combo: Exposure to both short- and long-term heat raises the risk of life-threatening complications during labor and delivery, Jessica Kutz reports for The 19th. A recent study found that extreme heat was associated with a 27 percent increase in “severe maternal morbidity,” a category that includes cardiac arrest, eclampsia, heart failure, and sepsis.

Read more

An “extreme heat belt” is emerging in the Midwest: When hazardous heat came to Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska in August, emergency rooms saw a record number of people suffering from heat-related illnesses. Many homes in the region are designed in a way that’s ill-prepared for hotter temperatures, Holly Edgell writes for Kansas City’s KCUR.

Read more

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why we need to sweat on Sep 19, 2023.

This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live. 

Under the relentless sun in Africa, the birthplace of humanity, every living thing had to find a way to beat the heat. Lions rested in the shade, termites built giant ventilation mounds, and elephants evolved giant ears that could flap like fans. Around 2 million years ago, our ancestors perfected the weirdest technique of them all: pushing water from inside our bodies to outside, a gift for enduring sweltering temperatures.

Other animals can sweat a bit, but not like us. Running around in the heat, a person can shed more than two gallons of water each day, draining one of life’s precious resources at a speedy pace. As the body tries to cool down, blood vessels widen, redirecting hot blood from the core of your body toward the surface. In tandem, sweat glands pump water, drawn from that blood, onto your skin. When those tiny beads evaporate, they carry heat off the body and into the air. 

“It is crucial to being human,” said Yana Kamberov, a geneticist studying the evolution of sweat at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s something that differentiates us from every other animal on the planet” — right up there with our oversized brains. The average person has between 2 and 4 million sweat glands in their skin, at 10 times the density of a chimpanzee’s, one of our closest living relatives. For humans, sweat proved even more useful than protective fur; our thick coat dwindled into peach fuzz to allow water to evaporate more efficiently.

Our biological sprinkler systems are now being put to the test. This summer was not just the hottest three consecutive months on record, but the hottest on Earth in 125,000 years. Phoenix spent 31 days in a row with a high of 110 degrees F or above. Across the Northern Hemisphere, from continent to continent, heat records fell at an alarming pace, with Morocco and China setting all-time highs above 120 degrees F. The swampy Gulf Coast heat soared as high as 115 degrees F, rewriting records for Houston and New Orleans. Even South America, in the throes of winter, saw unbelievable heat: A town in the Chilean Andes topped 100 degrees F — another all-time high.

It is getting to the point that life is dangerous without air-conditioning. If a widespread power outage hit Phoenix during a heat wave and lasted for days, it could kill thousands and send half the city to the emergency room, according to a recent study. And the soupy heat in the Gulf Coast comes with a challenge of its own: Super hot and humid air makes it hard for sweat to evaporate, because the environment is already thick with water molecules, which means more heat stays trapped inside the body, raising the risk of getting cooked from the inside out. 

“Dying from a heat wave is like a horror movie with 27 endings that you can choose from,” said Camilo Mora, a climate scientist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, who has cataloged 27 different ways that heat can lead to organ failure and death. 

As blood gets shunted toward the skin, for instance, it strains the heart and deprives the brain and gut of oxygen, leading to heart attacks and other grisly outcomes from widespread inflammation and clotting. Prolonged sweating can also cause dehydration, sometimes inducing kidney failure. Heat has so many ways to kill you that it’s easily the deadliest of all weather disasters Americans face. In 2017, Mora and colleagues found that 30 percent of the world’s population was already exposed to potentially deadly heat for 20 days or more each year.

Given how crucial perspiration is for survival, you’d think that researchers would have the science of sweat all figured out by now, but there are still open questions. Exactly how hot is too hot for the human body? How important is humidity? And why aren’t we more grateful for sweat? Its nasty reputation for making you stink belies the fact that it’s essentially a built-in life jacket to help you ride out record-breaking heat waves. 

Feeling moist and sticky is much better than the alternative — death by heat stroke. “I think it’s funny that humans have this enormous taboo about a biological function that’s ultimately going to help us survive climate change,” said Sarah Everts, the author of The Joy of Sweat.

Deadly heat can hit basically anywhere, catching people off-guard. Take the record-breaking temperatures that swept over Europe last summer, sending the thermostat soaring above 100 degrees F across the continent, resulting in more than 61,000 deaths. Our bodies can acclimatize to heat over a period of weeks, giving us the ability to sweat more. But temperatures can skyrocket quickly — in February this year, thermostats in Washington, D.C., jumped almost 30 degrees in a day, from a high of 53 degrees F one day to 81 the next. These kinds of leaps are a lot for our bodies to handle, making heat waves in cooler climates especially deadly.

Even in countries like Pakistan, where people are well-adapted to heat, sweltering temperatures are taking casualties. “With climate change, things are just going beyond limits of adaptation,” said Fahad Saeed, a scientist with the global climate policy institute Climate Analytics, who is based in Islamabad. “When you’re witnessing that in this part of the world, it really kind of tells you something is going beyond normal, because the people are acclimatized to this kind of weather, and still they are dying.”

A measure called the “wet-bulb temperature,” which combines heat and humidity with sunlight and wind speed, is used to calculate the threshold at which a healthy human body can no longer survive. Invented by the U.S. military in the 1950s after recruits kept collapsing from heat illness at a camp in South Carolina, it’s determined by covering a thermometer in a damp cloth and swinging it through the air to speed up evaporation. The theoretical point at which no amount of sweating can help you is thought to be six hours of exposure to a wet-bulb temperature of 35 degrees Celsius, or 95 degrees Fahrenheit. That translates to 95 degrees in complete humidity, for example, or 115 degrees at 50 percent humidity.

In recent years, parts of Pakistan and the Arabian Peninsula have already briefly crossed this scary threshold. And more heat will come, bringing parts of Mexico’s coasts and more of South Asia into the danger zone. Worryingly, climate change is also driving up the moisture content of the air, especially in the tropics.

Newer research suggests that the limit might be even lower than 35 degrees C. In a study last year at Penn State University, young people volunteered to subject themselves to uncomfortably hot conditions in a lab. Participants swallowed telemetry pills that monitored their core body temperature and sat in a controlled chamber, moving just enough to mimic everyday activities like cooking and eating. When the body fails to stabilize its core temperature, things start to spiral out of control: In extreme conditions, heat stroke can set in within 10 to 15 minutes. The researchers found that the upper limit of safety, based on when the participants’ core temperatures started rising, was likely closer to a wet-bulb temperature of 31 degrees C, or 88 degrees F.  

And that’s for healthy people. Factors like age, illness, and body size change the math. People over the age of 60, who account for an estimated 80 percent of the 12,000 heat-related deaths in the United States each year, often have health conditions that make heat more dangerous. What’s more, as people get older, their sweat glands deteriorate, undermining their ability to cool down. Some antipsychotic medications have a side effect of suppressing sweating, possibly one of many reasons why those diagnosed with schizophrenia are particularly vulnerable to dying in the heat.

The reality is that most people don’t take all the necessary steps to stay cool during a heat wave, like seeking shade or drinking lots of cold water — another reason that a pragmatic “danger zone” for temperatures starts well below 35 degrees C. Earlier this month, researchers from the University of Oxford and the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts analyzed the hot and humid conditions under which the human body starts to overheat unless specific actions to cool down are taken. They found that under our current climate, 8 percent of the land on Earth will meet this threshold at least once a decade. That would increase to a quarter if global temperatures warm 2 degrees C above the preindustrial average, the amount we can expect if existing and planned fossil fuel projects are carried through.

Still, there’s a debate around how much humidity matters in health outcomes, said Jane Baldwin, an Earth systems science professor at the University of California, Irvine. Humidity isn’t showing up as a key driver of deaths in real-world epidemiological data like you’d expect based on theories about wet-bulb temperature. Baldwin recently coauthored a study trying to explain this discrepancy. One explanation could be that epidemiological data tends to come from cooler parts of the world, like Europe and the United States, whereas data is limited from tropical countries like India, Ghana, and Brazil, where the link between humidity and death would likely be strongest. Nailing down an answer to this question would help scientists make more accurate predictions about how climate change will affect health, Baldwin said. 

The opposite extreme — dry air — could present its own set of problems. In arid conditions, sweat evaporates very quickly. That’s great for cooling off, but sweat production has a limit, said Ollie Jay, a health professor at the University of Sydney in Australia. At rest, it’s hard to sweat more than a liter per hour, he said, but when you’re exercising, closer to three liters can pour out of your body in an hour. If you managed to reach that point of maximum sweatiness in dry heat, then you wouldn’t be able to sweat enough to cool down. “Most climate models for assessing future heat-stress risk assume that the body has an unlimited capacity to produce sweat,” Jay said, almost certainly leading to overestimates for what humans can handle in hot, arid climates.

Another unknown is just how much early exposure to heat changes our ability to sweat. One theory is that being exposed to high temperatures in the first two years of life can activate more sweat glands; we’re born with roughly the same number of sweat glands, but not all of them turn on and start pumping water. As a result, people born in hot places might have more active sweat glands than those born in cold climates. 

It raises questions of whether those who spend their youth avoiding sweat-soaked clothes by hiding in artificially cooled buildings could be less prepared for life on an increasingly hot planet. “Imagine, if you raise your babies purely in air conditioning,” Kamberov said, “then in a warmer world, how capable of adapting will they be?”

Sweat is essentially saving our lives all summer long — though you probably don’t enjoy it. Everts, the author of The Joy of Sweat, speculates that it violates our desire to be in control. Sweat pours out of us involuntarily: We can’t hold it in or delay it with willpower, unlike burps or farts. “When your body gets the cooldown directive, those pores open, and the sweat pours out,” Everts said, “and there’s absolutely nothing you can do to control that, right?” 

It doesn’t help that a sweaty person is often a stinky one, the curse of locker rooms everywhere. Sweat itself is odorless — it’s mostly just water — but when it mixes with bacteria on your skin, it can raise a stench. There are two types of sweat glands: Eccrine glands, the most prominent, are responsible for keeping your temperature in check and found all over the body — particularly on your forehead, palms, and the bottoms of your feet. Apocrine glands in hairy areas like the armpits and groin become active during puberty, secreting a thicker, protein-rich sweat that bacteria convert into that embarrassing aroma. Plugging your armpit pores with antiperspirant, then, won’t affect your ability to cool down: There are plenty of other escape routes on your skin.

In the olden days, people applied perfume and talcum powder to try to cover up the smell of B.O. But they were so used to it that by the time antiperspirants and deodorants came onto the market around the turn of the 20th century — the former aimed at blocking sweat pores, the latter at fighting odor-producing bacteria —  hardly anyone wanted to buy them. That posed a problem for the manufacturers. So in 1919, a copywriter named James Young who was working for the antiperspirant company Odorono (odor, oh no!) “put the fear of sweat in Americans,” Everts said. One magazine ad with the headline “The most humiliating moment in my life” featured a young woman overhearing that no one would dance with her because she suffered “frightfully from perspiration.” The idea was not just to make people aware of their stink, but to make them afraid it would stop them from finding love or a decent job. “I just wish people were less mortified by sweat,” Everts said.

The marketing campaign was a lasting success, even a century later. Last year, the global deodorant market was valued at $24 billion, and it’s on track to grow to $37 billion by the end of the decade, in part because of global warming, according to the market research firm Fortune Business Insights.

Today, some cultures are more matter-of-fact about sweat than others. In Pakistan, it’s simply a fact of life, Saeed said. Still, excessive sweating is frowned upon basically everywhere. “What can save you is not culturally accepted,” said Mora, the University of Hawaiʻi scientist. “I cannot imagine anywhere in the world where you would like to be hugged by a sweaty person.”

How sweaty you are isn’t in your control — but what you wear is. Hot, humid climates call for more exposed skin, making it easier for your sweat to evaporate; perhaps counterintuitively, loose, long sleeves and pants help you reap the benefits of sweat in arid climates, keeping the water from evaporating too quickly and at the same time blocking sunlight. Konrad Rykaczewski, a professor of engineering at Arizona State University, is researching how to help design clothing that maximizes the effectiveness of sweating. He says that scientists still don’t understand a lot about sweat on the scale that really matters for clothing design.

“The question is, how much of the sweat we produce actually goes to cooling us?” Rykaczewski said. Sweating profusely isn’t helping anyone — sweat that drips off your forehead is essentially wasted water, since it didn’t evaporate off you. By the same token, trapping a bunch of sweat underneath a hazmat suit could leave you susceptible to heat illnesses. Counterintuitively, even fabrics that wick sweat can end up stealing it away from your skin and wasting it, Rykaczewski said. When that water evaporates, it’ll cool the fabric and the air between the fabric and your skin, instead of your body directly.

Rykaczewski’s research is focused on understanding how heat affects the human body in the real world, something that’s difficult to study. “No one’s measuring someone that’s going to get heatstroke, right?” Rykaczewski said. “That’s not ethical.” 

So, in place of live humans, he and his colleagues at Arizona State have developed a sweating robot, technically called a “thermal mannequin,” that simulates human responses to super-hot temperatures. The robot — named ANDI for “Advanced Newton Dynamic Instrument” — takes frequent trips into the sizzling Arizona heat, equipped with sensors, an internal cooling system, as well as pores for sweating. One unique thing about ANDI is that it can represent anyone. Rykaczewski can modify the program to simulate how a person might weather the heat, calculating how factors like age, body size, or drug use might affect the body’s response in different situations. And it all comes at the low cost of $650,000. “We basically are developing the most expensive way to measure heat impacts on humans,” Rykaczewski joked.

ANDI is essentially a crash test dummy for a hotter planet. Our bodies are up against heat that threatens to render our dampness useless. Humans have been sweating for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s core to who we are. But to truly understand it? For that, we needed to build a robot.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Will sweat help us survive climate change? on Sep 19, 2023.

The clean energy transition will require lots of batteries — primarily to power electric vehicles and to store renewable energy that can be dispatched to the electric grid on demand. European Union policymakers are growing more concerned about where the bloc will get all the metals required to build those batteries. One potential source? Dead lithium-ion batteries from EVs, e-bikes, and consumer electronics, which contain lithium, cobalt, nickel, and other ingredients needed to make new ones.

Recycling the metals used in batteries has the potential to limit the need for environmentally damaging mining while also reducing electronic waste. But Europe’s lithium-ion battery recycling industry is in its infancy. While manufacturers sold nearly 700,000 tons of lithium-ion batteries into the European market last year, recyclers only had the capacity to process about 17,000 tons of battery waste, according to Circular Energy Storage, a data analysis firm for the battery industry.

New rules that entered force last month could help change that. After years of negotiations, the EU just adopted a comprehensive battery regulation that could spur battery recycling at a scale never seen before outside of China. Battery industry experts say the policy has the potential to supercharge lithium-ion battery recycling across the bloc. 

The EU’s new battery rules “will make a very big impact for the whole supply chain not only in Europe but also globally,” Xiao Lin, CEO of the Chinese battery metal recycling consultancy Botree Cycling, told Grist. 

The battery regulation replaces a 2006 policy that focused on minimizing the health risks caused by hazardous battery ingredients like lead and cadmium. The new rules reflect the larger role that batteries, particularly lithium-ion ones, play in society today, and the EU’s desire to ensure they are sustainable throughout their entire life cycle, from manufacturing to disposal. The regulation requires manufacturers to collect waste lithium-ion batteries for recycling and, in the case of EV, e-bike, and energy storage batteries, incorporate recycled materials into new ones. The battery regulation also includes ambitious metals recovery targets, pushing recyclers to use technologies that do a good job reclaiming critical resources like lithium.

The regulation comes at a pivotal moment. EV sales are booming in Europe and around the world, causing demand for the metals inside their batteries to skyrocket. Hundreds of new mines may be needed to supply those metals by the mid-2030s. But mining takes a significant toll on the environment, and often, local communities. Most EU nations have limited battery metal resources, forcing them to rely on imports from countries with poor environmental and human rights track records.

Battery recycling is often touted as a more sustainable way to ease long-term supply pressure. Spent EV batteries, as well as the smaller batteries inside e-bikes, power tools, smartphones, and more, are rich in the metals needed to make new ones. Today, China leads the world in lithium-ion battery recycling, thanks in part to policies that have encouraged it in the EV sector, specifically. In 2018, China’s government stipulated that EV makers are responsible for collecting dead batteries, and it set ambitious metals recovery rates that recyclers must meet to be included on a government white list.

The EU is now following in China’s footsteps by directing manufacturers to ensure that batteries are collected for recycling at no charge to consumers. For consumer electronic and “light means of transport” batteries — those used in e-scooters, e-bikes, and the like — collection rates will gradually increase over the next decade. In the EV and energy storage sectors, meanwhile, manufacturers are required to take back all batteries for recycling. Bosch, which manufacturers batteries for the European e-bike industry, told Grist in an emailed statement that bicycle makers have “either already successfully introduced or are currently working on collection systems” to meet the new requirements, with e-bike battery take-back programs currently up and running in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.

Recyclers, meanwhile, are required to hit stringent metal recovery targets, including 80 percent of the lithium contained in a battery, and 95 percent of its cobalt, copper, nickel and lead, by the end of 2031. Alissa Kendall, a battery recycling expert at the University of California, Davis, says that these recovery rates will push recyclers away from pyrometallurgy, an older technique in which batteries are smelted in a furnace to produce a low-quality metal alloy. Instead, Kendall expects the new rules will accelerate the industry-wide shift toward hydrometallurgy. Hydrometallurgical recyclers typically shred batteries to produce a powder called “black mass,” then separate and purify individual metals using chemical solvents. While pyrometallurgical recycling often results in significant lithium losses, recyclers using hydrometallurgy claim they can recover lithium at high rates. There are also environmental benefits: While pyrometallurgy uses considerable energy and produces toxic gases that must be captured or remediated, hydrometallurgy requires less energy and generates lower emissions (although the strong acids involved require careful disposal).

“Our industry-leading, sustainable lithium-ion battery recycling technology is geared towards meeting lithium, cobalt, and nickel recovery targets set forth in the Battery Regulation,” a spokesperson for Canada-based battery recycler Li-Cycle told Grist in an email, adding that Europe’s regulations are “very positive for the growth of the industry.” Li-Cycle is one of several hydrometallurgical recycling companies in the process of massively expanding its presence in Europe: Last month, it opened a black mass facility in Germany and announced plans for a future recycling hub in Italy. 

Recycling doesn’t have to take place in Europe as long as it meets EU standards. Lin says that many Asian recyclers are already meeting or exceeding the metal recovery rates in the European battery regulation. But Lin expects established recyclers will run into trouble with other EU standards, such as a requirement that 70 percent of the weight of batteries be recycled by the end of 2030. In China, about 65 percent of EV batteries sold today are lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, a chemistry that contains no nickel or cobalt. Aside from lithium, there’s very little in these batteries worth recycling. As a result, Lin says, recyclers are used to recovering about 3 percent of their materials by weight.

“It’s very different to reach 70 percent,” Lin said. Recyclers outside of Europe that want to cater to the EU market, Lin says, may have to set up new European facilities with more advanced technologies. 

In addition to mandating efficient recycling, the new battery regulation seeks to ensure that recycled materials get incorporated into new batteries. By 2031, the EU will require that new EV and storage batteries contain at least 6 percent recycled lithium and nickel, 16 percent recycled cobalt, and 85 percent recycled lead. These figures will rise to 12 percent recycled lithium, 15 percent recycled nickel, and 26 percent recycled cobalt by 2036 (at which point they will also apply to “light means of transport” batteries). But while the intent of the recycled content standards is to promote the reuse of critical resources, experts warn that they could have unintended consequences.

Andy Leach, an energy storage analyst at consultancy BloombergNEF, says that if the recycled content standards are higher than what the recycling market can deliver on its own, companies might be forced to recycle batteries prematurely in order to reach them. Overly ambitious targets could also encourage battery makers to be wasteful, since the standards can be met with either end-of-life batteries or battery production scrap, which consists of cuttings and leftovers from the battery manufacturing process, as well as battery components that didn’t meet quality control standards. If there aren’t enough end-of-life batteries to meet the requirements, battery makers may be encouraged to keep generating large volumes of scrap, rather than implement efficiency improvements that reduce manufacturing waste over time. 

“Recycling’s important, but we also shouldn’t rush into it if the materials aren’t there to be recycled,” Leach said. 

Bosch, the e-bike battery manufacturer, called the recycled content targets “very ambitious,” adding that “the availability of recycled raw materials is the biggest challenge” to meeting them. 

In particular, the achievability of the recycled content standards will depend on the return of heavy, mineral-rich EV batteries for recycling. But these batteries are long lived, and they are often repurposed for a second application like grid storage, meaning it could be years before large numbers of them are ready to be recycled. Li-Cycle told Grist that the company expects manufacturing scrap to represent “the bulk of our feedstock” over the next few years, with end-of-life EV batteries becoming more important in the 2030s. BASF, a German battery materials maker that is expanding its battery recycling operations, told Grist that it also “plans to recycle scrap” from battery production until more dead EV batteries are available.

While recycled content standards may encourage waste if they’re too aggressive, Kendall of UC Davis emphasized the importance of these standards for improving the economics of recycling. By placing a premium on recycled lithium and other metals, the standards could “increase the value globally for recycled materials,” she said. In a best-case scenario, that might help other emerging battery recycling markets become more economically viable over the long term. Those include the United States, where several companies are now building huge new plants to recycle EV batteries despite no federal mandates. (U.S. recyclers are, however, being supported by big federal loans.)

Despite uncertainties, many in the industry are hopeful that the new EU regulation will help battery recycling reach the scale needed to ease future mining pressure. Kurt Vandeputte, senior vice president of battery recycling solutions at the Belgian-based metals company Umicore, called the regulation “a smart way of saying that we have to be careful and we have to create a closed loop of critical materials.”

“It’s going to be the blueprint for many other industries,” Vandeputte said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New battery recycling rules could be a game-changer in the EU’s search for EV minerals on Sep 19, 2023.

At the stroke of midnight on Friday, in three automotive factories across the Rust Belt, night shift workers left their posts and poured out onto the streets to join whistling, cheering crowds. TV news footage from the night showed picketers intermingled with cars honking in support as R&B blared from sound systems on the sidewalks in front of the factory gates. For the first time in history, the United Auto Workers union, or UAW, initiated a strike targeting all of the “Big Three” automakers: Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, which owns brands like Chrysler, Jeep, and Dodge. 

The strike marks a breaking point after months of negotiations failed to result in a deal to renew the union’s contract with Big Three automakers, which expired on Friday. For now, the strike covers only 13,000 workers at a General Motors plant in Wentzville, Missouri; a Stellantis plant in Toledo, Ohio; and a Ford assembly plant in Wayne, Michigan. But the three closures could be just the beginning. UAW president Shawn Fain has warned that all 146,000 union workers are ready to strike at a moment’s notice. “If we need to go all out, we will,” said Fain Thursday night on Facebook Live. “Everything is on the table.” 

If the work stoppage goes on for more than 10 days, analysts estimate it could cost automakers over $1 billion and hurt plans to push new electric vehicles, or EVs, onto the market.

EVs, and what they mean for the future of union labor in the automotive sector, loom large over the picket line. Automakers say meeting the union’s demands would threaten their ability to compete with non-unionized EV producers like Tesla, adding burdensome labor costs just as they’re making expensive investments in EVs. Workers, meanwhile, worry that billions in EV investments aren’t translating into good-paying, union jobs.

“It’s our job to organize,” Tony Totty, president of UAW Local 14 in Toledo, Ohio, told Grist. “These corporations don’t wanna share in our sweat equity with the profits we provide them.”   

Collectively, the Big Three have committed to investing well over $100 billion in EV manufacturing over the next few years. The companies have also proposed 10 EV battery plants owned jointly with companies including South Korea-based LG Energy Solution and Samsung. Most new EV and battery plants are located in a growing “Battery Belt,” with Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee leading the charge alongside the traditional automotive heartlands of Michigan and Ohio. Many of those states have “right to work” laws that curtail collective bargaining, leading to lower union density and lower pay grades overall. Indeed, the vast majority of the Big Three’s proposed battery plants are nonunion. 

To keep union membership strong, protect worker safety, and prevent the EV surge from undermining their bargaining power, the union has asked to include EV battery workers in their national contracts. “Now is really the moment, as the industry starts to take off, to ensure that those jobs can be union jobs,” J. Mijin Cha, an environmental studies professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz who studies labor issues and climate justice, told Grist. 

Ford and Volkswagen have estimated that 30 percent less labor is required to build an EV compared to an internal combustion engine car, since EVs don’t require the complex parts needed to build engines and transmissions. Meanwhile, non-union automakers like Tesla and Toyota are gaining an edge in the EV space, and offering substantially lower compensation than the Big Three. Ford has estimated the Big Three’s average hourly labor costs, including benefits, amount to around $65 per worker, compared to about $55 for foreign non-union automakers in the U.S. like Toyota and Nissan. Tesla’s labor costs are even lower — at around $45 to $50 per worker per hour, according to industry analysts. 

Auto workers are watching this change with some trepidation, according to Marick Masters, a professor of management at Wayne State University who studies the auto industry and labor. “The shift to electrification both threatens jobs and it also threatens to establish another lower tier of wages in the industry,” he said. The UAW has so far had a string of organizing failures in the South, mostly associated with the region’s large number of foreign automakers, like Volkswagen and Nissan. 

Totty, the Toledo-based UAW local president, has advocated heavily for union contracts at new battery plants. He personally welcomes the EV shift. His plant, Toledo Propulsion Systems, received $760 million in federal funding to transform the transmission plant into a plant that makes EV parts. Totty doesn’t believe it’ll take much extra training, or that anyone at the plant will lose their job. “We’re embracing it,” he said. What’s more concerning to him is the power and income imbalance between the people who do the backbreaking work at the plant, and the people who own it. 

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Among the UAW’s demands for its new contract is a 40 percent raise over the next four years, which it says is equal to the collective rise in CEO compensation at the Big Three over the past four years. The union has also asked for cost of living adjustments, the reinstatement of pensions, a 32-hour work week, and the elimination of a tiered wage system that pays newer employees less for the same work. So far, the three companies have countered with a 20 percent raise. As of Monday, the companies had not agreed to most of the union’s other demands. 

In an interview with the New York Times, Ford CEO Jim Farley claimed that meeting UAW demands would prevent the company from investing in EVs. “We want to actually have a conversation about a sustainable future,” he told the Times, “not one that forces us to choose between going out of business and rewarding our workers.”

According to the union, the companies continue to make record-breaking profits, netting over $21 billion in just the first six months of 2023 and $250 billion over the last 10 years. Though the vast majority of those profits come from internal combustion engine cars, with EVs still a relatively small market, the auto companies are already tapping into billions of dollars in federal investments to electrify their fleets. 

EVs are central to President Joe Biden’s climate agenda. Through the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration has authorized nearly $100 billion in funding dedicated or availables to support growth in the industry’s domestic supply chain. It’s part of Biden’s plan to, according to a recent Department of Energy EV funding announcement, “Create Not Just More Jobs But Good Jobs, Including Union Jobs.” More than $15 billion of that number is intended to support existing factories in the EV transition, in hopes of keeping manufacturing jobs in communities that rely on them. The administration has also made aggressive regulatory moves to push for EVs — under vehicle emissions standards released by the Environmental Protection Agency in April, EVs would need to make up two-thirds of all car sales in the U.S. by 2031.

Masters says that auto companies are responding to this pressure. “The companies,” he said, “are on board, and their train has left the station. They’re going out of the internal combustion engine business.”

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Some are calling the UAW strike the biggest labor crisis of the Biden presidency so far. The UAW has not yet endorsed Biden as a presidential candidate, citing inconsistencies between the administration’s push for EVs and its close ties with the labor movement. The union has previously criticized the president for lending billions to auto companies for EV manufacturing without requiring protections for union labor. UAW leaders have asked Biden to hold firm on his promises to deliver union jobs with clean energy investment, or else risk the energy transition exacerbating economic inequality.

The strike will continue, UAW has said, as long as parties fail to reach a consensus. Workers are organizing at Big Three factories across the country, preparing to shut them down if the moment calls for it. Experts say that a long-term strike could seriously hurt sales at the Big Three, possibly giving companies like Tesla a competitive edge.

“The UAW supports and is ready for the transition to a clean auto industry,” Fain said in a release. “But the EV transition must be a just transition that ensures auto workers have a place in the new economy.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the shift to electric vehicles is fueling the UAW strike on Sep 18, 2023.