America's electric cars need lithium so badly it may wipe out this species

Source - Center for Biological Diversity

The challenge of balancing conservation versus commerce is ages old and not getting any simpler.

Whether it was the desires of companies to harvest timber in the Pacific Northwest running into conservationists attempts to protect the spotted owl in the 1990s or the more modern concerns of lithium miners who see the Nevada desert as a 'gold' mine running afoul of lovers of Tiehm's buckwheat which, according to a cnn.com article, "grows on 10 acres in... Southwest Nevada... and... can grow nowhere else in the world", the concerns are infinitely more complicated than they first appear.

The environmental side of me says that we need lithium. We need it because that's one of the keys to shifting from internal combustion to electric vehicles.

But is it worth the extinction of a single species to accomplish that?

Man, it's not my place to say, but it's not as easy a question as it might at appears to be to some on either side of the question.

(Update: As of October, Tiehm's buckwheat looks to be headed toward the endangered species list and all the protections that involves at the urging of the Center for Biological Diversity.)

Millions of electric cars are coming. What happens to all the dead batteries?

Source - https://usgreentechnology.com/recycling-reusing-electric-car-batteries/

A few years back I remember reading an article comparing the initial energy deficit that a rechargeable made for a hybrid car like a Prius compared to a Hummer (a stereotypically environmentally unfriendly vehicle). 

I haven't been able to find that article which - from my admittedly distant memory - stated that a Prius would have to be driven for a year and a half before it made up the initial energy deficit from the purification of elements in its rechargeable battery allowed it to catch up to a Hummer which took less energy to source its components.

I have, however, found a couple of articles that address similar concerns around the battery problem with electric vehicles. Creating batteries - particularly modern, high performance batteries - requires sourcing easily oxidized elements such as lithium, purification that requires massive amounts of energy output. Those batteries, sadly, aren't eternal and eventually have to be replaced and recycled. 

And there's the rub. What to do with those batteries once they're spent?

• From Science.org "A Dead Battery Dilemma: with millions of electric vehicles set to hit the road, scientists are seeking better battery recycling methods"
• From Wired.com "Cars Are Going Electric. What Happens to the Used Batteries?"

Life Cycle Assessment

I've frequently mentioned the ASM Materials Camps for teachers (returning in-person for summer 2022, hopefully near you). In pre-pandemic times I taught a few of them in person each summer. Over the past couple of years I've taught a couple of them virtually each summer.

But not only am I a camp leader, I'm also a camp taker. I took the first and second year camps a decade or so ago, and I've taken a couple of their specialty camps in the summer since. I took a corrosion camp at the University of Akron and - last summer - a camp on sustainable materials online.

One of the major focuses of the sustainability camp was the concept of a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). This process looks at a product's impact on the environment from source (mining, drilling, growing, whatever) to disposal (reuse, recycling, or simply landfilling). The process can become incredibly detailed - to a level well beyond the day or two we spent discussing the LCA in our camp - but can also be done at an introductory level for middle or high school materials students. 

If you want to take a look at some very in-depth LCAs, here are some links to documents comparing various grocery bags (the cliched 'paper or plastic?' debate).

• Clemson University, "Life Cycle Assessment of Grocery Bags in Common Use in the United States" (194 pages)
• Californians Against Waste, "A Brief Analysis of Life Cycle Analyses (LCAs) and the Impacts of Plastic Vs. Paper Bags" (4 page)
• Life Cycle Initiative, "Single-use plastic bags and their alternatives" (76 pages)
• National Council for Air and Stream Improvement, "Review of Life Cycle Assessments Comparing Paper and Plastic Products" (43 pages)

And I'll post some more LCA basic videos after the jump.

'Vegan spider silk' provides sustainable alternative to single-use plastics

The phrase 'vegan spider silk' seems weird in a dozen different ways, but I understand that scientists described in the video are using plant-sources proteins to assemble a polymer similar to those in spider silk.

And if they can find a way to make single-use plastic products home compostable - which this video and various articles (links below) claim they have - then they've made something really useful. I would love if I could throw my various plastic materials into the compost bin and have them actually break down in a reasonable amount of time.

More info on this product can be found at...

• https://www.xampla.com/
• https://www.greenmatters.com/p/vegan-spider-silk
• https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2021/06/23/Xampla-Vegan-spider-silk-developed-from-plant-proteins-to-replace-single-use-plastics
• https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a36699779/synthetic-spider-silk-plastic-pollution/
• https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/571607

Going green shouldn't be this hard

Reduce...I know...reduce.

Admittedly, the four-year jar of trash seems ridiculously daunting to me. My wife and I have tried to minimize our waste, but we're nowhere near that level of trash minimization.

I do appreciate the complaint about the government allowing companies to sell single use materials and containers without having a way to recycle their product where they're selling it. I'm liberal enough that I'm fully okay with the government instituting regulations to change that because I think it's pretty clear that the free market isn't ever going to fix our environmental problems. (Sorry, I'll step off of my soapbox and get back to the material science. I'm thinking I might need to start decreasing my leanings into the post-consumer side of material science in my blogging.)

This video looks at some effects of California's regulations on carbon taxing  and a cap on carbon emissions. Turns out that regulating things like carbon emissions isn't bad for business because it's good for people patronizing those businesses.

How Plastic Made With Algae Can Clean Waterways | World Wide Waste

The World Wide Waste series from Business Insider is rich with material science content. You'll be seeing most of their videos on the blog eventually, but I certainly recommend watching them before that.

This video explores a project to jointly clean waterways prone to algal blooms and produce plastics which can then be used to produce whatever plastic products would normally be made from many plastics.

Anything that replaces some of our oil-based polymers - even if it's not replacing 100% of the polymer - is a good thing. I appreciate that the latter half o the video explores some of the more complex aspects of this issue - trapping carbon dioxide in plastics isn't the final answer because it still creates more plastics, the causes of the algal blooms, the environmental costs of shipping the algae and products across the oceans. 

It sounds like this is a better option than plastics but that it's not perfect. 

Small steps add up, I guess.

Nitinol: The Shape Memory Effect and Superelasticity

The initial part of this video from The Engineering Guy isn't anything new to most of us teaching material science: NiTiNOL changes shape as its temperature is raised. From there, though, this video does a great job showing animations and graphics explaining what's happening within NiTiNOL when its temperature changes. 

I haven't heard the explanation of the mirrored or non-mirrored rhombic crystals. That's really interesting, and I'd admittedly like to get some confirmation from an expert that it's not an over simplification.