Amnesty International has faulted the electric vehicle industry for selling itself as environmentally friendly while producing many of its batteries using polluting fossil fuels and unethically sourced minerals.
Manufacturing batteries can be carbon intensive, while the extraction of minerals used in them has been linked to human rights violations such as child labour, a statement from the rights group said.
“Electric vehicles are key to shifting the motor industry away from fossil fuels, but they arecurrently not as ethical as some retailers would like us to believe,” it said. Production of lithium-ion batteries for EVs is power intensive, and factories are concentrated in China, South Korea and Japan, where power generation is largely dependent on coal or other fossil fuels, Amnesty said.
