From cobalt pits in Congo to lithium fields in Zimbabwe, the “clean energy” revolution begins in some of the world’s most exploited backyards.
In the mineral-rich Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), miners as young as teenagers toil in red earth, chipping out lumps of cobalt by hand. Many earn around $3.50 a day, a wage that is shockingly low yet still above the norm in a country where over 70% of people survive on less than $1.90 per day. The scene is Dickensian: workers with crude tools, minimal safety gear, and backbreaking quotas. Yet their labor feeds a global supply chain for electric vehicle (EV) batteries – the very batteries trumpeted as the key to a green future.
Take Congo’s cobalt, a critical ingredient in lithium-ion batteries. The DRC supplies roughly 60–70% of the world’s cobalt, but this bonanza comes at a dire human and environmental cost. Years of unregulated mining have polluted rivers and devastated farmlands in Katanga. “In this stream, the fish vanished long ago, killed by acids and waste from the mines,” says one Congolese resident, standing by a lifeless waterway. Scientific studies confirm the locals’ fears: fish near mining towns are contaminated with cobalt, and communities face heightened risks of birth defects and illnesses due to toxic mining pollution. Cobalt has even earned the grim moniker “blood cobalt”, as human rights abuses – child labor, deadly accidents, and what workers liken to a “slave and master” relationship – taint its extraction.
In Zimbabwe, a similar story is unfolding amid its lithium boom. The country sits on Africa’s largest lithium reserves, drawing aggressive investment from global (especially Chinese) firms. For impoverished local communities, the promised benefits of lithium wealth have been elusive. Instead, villagers near lithium sites report land displacements, unsafe working conditions, and water pollution. “There are many challenges with the current hype about the energy transition. It is not about us,” observes Farai Maguwu, a Zimbabwean resource governance expert. His words reflect a growing resentment that the rush for EV minerals mirrors past resource curses: wealth flowing out, while locals bear environmental ruin and meager wages.
The Battery Lifespan and Toxic Afterlife
Even as these raw materials are wrested from the earth at great human cost, they eventually find their way into sleek electric cars – from California’s Teslas to China’s BYDs – zipping silently on clean city streets. But what happens at the end of an EV battery’s life? The answer is sobering. Modern EV batteries are engineered to last 8 to 10 years (around 1,500–2,000 charge cycles) in normal use, after which their capacity drops below useful levels.
This means the first wave of mass EV battery retirements globally is just around the corner, and Pakistan – where EVs are only now beginning to appear – will face the issue within the decade. The retired batteries are massive, high-tech, toxic waste. Left to themselves, they won’t quietly biodegrade like organic matter. Lithium-ion batteries can take hundreds of years to decompose, far longer than an average human lifespan. In the interim, their casings can crack, and their cells corrode, leaching a cocktail of heavy metals and poisonous chemicals into the soil and groundwater.
What’s inside an EV battery that makes it so hazardous when it breaks down?
A typical lithium-ion pack contains metals such as cobalt, nickel, and manganese, as well as lithium, copper, and aluminum, along with toxic electrolyte chemicals. As the battery decays, compounds of these metals can seep out. Environmental researchers note that arsenic, cadmium, chromium, and cobalt from battery waste frequently contaminate nearby water and soil. In landfills, such leaks have even been known to spark underground fires when reactive battery materials short-circuit – fires that release noxious smoke and are extremely hard to extinguish. Inhalation or ingestion of the particles from a decomposing battery is a serious health hazard, linked to organ damage and cancers in humans and wildlife.
In short, a dead EV battery is a toxic time bomb: if simply dumped or abandoned, it will persist for generations, gradually poisoning its surroundings.
For a country like Pakistan, which already struggles with basic waste management, this raises an urgent question: are we prepared to handle the coming onslaught of e-waste?
Before tackling that, it is worth noting that not all EV batteries are identical – and their composition affects both performance and end-of-life risks. Different automakers use different battery chemistries. Tesla, the American EV pioneer, has long prioritized maximum range and power; its flagship models use high-energy nickel-cobalt-aluminum (NCA) oxide cells made by Panasonic, while its newer mass-market cars (like the Model 3) often use nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) cells, or even lithium iron phosphate in some versions. These chemistries contain varying amounts of cobalt and nickel (both toxic heavy metals). BYD, China’s EV giant now expanding globally, takes a different approach.
BYD’s much-heralded “Blade Battery” uses lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry – notably free of cobalt and nickel, which makes it cheaper and intrinsically safer (less prone to fire) but also lower in energy density. MG Motors, a Chinese-owned brand already selling EVs in Pakistan, equips its ZS EV model with a 44.5 kWh NMC lithium-ion battery pack. That gives the car decent range, but also means the battery contains those same problematic elements (nickel, manganese, cobalt). Early Nissan Leafs – one of the first mass-market EVs – used a lithium-manganese oxide cathode (blended with some nickel) and notably lacked active battery cooling. Those choices made the Leaf’s battery prone to faster degradation in hot climates and highlighted how some battery types trade longevity for safety or cost.
Why do these technical details matter?
Because when an EV battery “dies”, its specific chemistry dictates the pollutants it can release. A Tesla’s NCA battery, for instance, is rich in nickel and cobalt – elements that can contaminate water and soil in trace amounts. An LFP battery (like BYD’s) avoids those metals, which is better environmentally. However, the electrolyte still contains lithium salts and fluorinated compounds, which are harmful if not properly contained. Crucially, none of these batteries can simply be landfilled without risk. The best case is to prevent them from rotting at all – by recycling them before they can leak. But recycling on the necessary scale is a complex industrial challenge in itself.
Recycling vs. Rotting: How to Dispose of Dead Batteries
If an EV battery cannot be left to corrode in a junkyard, what does “professional” disposal look like? In theory, an old lithium-ion pack should be sent to a specialized battery recycling facility. There, technicians in protective gear discharge any remaining energy (to prevent explosions) and then break down the battery for material recovery. The current recycling methods fall into two main categories, and each comes with environmental trade-offs.
One approach is pyrometallurgy, essentially high-temperature smelting. Batteries are shredded and fed into a furnace or smelter, often with other scrap, to melt the metals. The process can recover valuable metals, such as cobalt, nickel, and copper, from alloys. However, it is energy-intensive – imagine melting down a battery at over 1,000°C – and it releases toxic fumes that must be carefully scrubbed. Even in controlled facilities, smelting emits pollutants such as chlorine and sulfur compounds. Slag and ash byproducts contain other metals and require safe disposal. Moreover, lithium and aluminum often don’t survive the smelting process and end up as waste. In short, pyrometallurgy reduces the immediate toxin problem but at the cost of high energy use and air pollution (if not managed properly).
Another method is hydrometallurgy – a chemical leaching process. Here, battery materials are dissolved in strong acids or solvents to extract metals. Hydrometallurgical recycling can be more efficient at recovering lithium (and other light metals that smelting might lose). It typically operates at lower temperatures, which means lower energy use and lower greenhouse gas emissions than smelting. But the trade-off is the creation of hazardous liquid waste: the acidic solutions and chemical residues that must be treated. If done sloppily, hydrometallurgy could pollute water sources. In either case, a recycling plant is a costly, high-tech undertaking – requiring filters, scrubbers, waste treatment, and worker safety measures to be truly “green” and human-friendly. As one industry analysis bluntly puts it, incinerating or landfilling lithium batteries is cheap but dangerous, whereas recycling is safer but expensive and technically demanding.
Despite these challenges, the world is gearing up for a battery recycling boom. It has to – by some estimates, millions of tons of lithium battery waste could be generated by 2030 if end-of-life packs aren’t recycled. The European Union has moved early on this issue: under a new EU regulation, battery producers will be legally required to recycle up to 95% of battery materials by 2031. Already, companies in Europe (for example, Belgium’s Umicore) run large plants that recover cobalt, nickel, and copper from spent batteries, feeding those materials back into new batteries in a circular economy.
China is also sprinting ahead – as the world’s largest EV market, it is set to face a tsunami of retired batteries. In response, Beijing has introduced strict rules from 2026 onward: EV manufacturers must take responsibility for their batteries’ entire life cycle, including setting up collection networks and recycling services. A national battery-tracking system is being implemented to prevent used packs from simply vanishing into the black market. Thanks to heavy government push, Chinese companies have developed advanced techniques – one report noted that some Chinese recyclers can now recover 96.5% of the lithium and over 99% of nickel, cobalt, and manganese from used batteries. That level of efficiency points to a future where perhaps very little of a battery actually goes to waste.
And what about Pakistan?
As of today, Pakistan has no large-scale lithium-ion battery recycling facility. It hardly has any e-waste recycling infrastructure at all to speak of – even recycling of lead-acid batteries (from conventional cars and UPS systems) is mostly done by informal cottage industries that often cause lead pollution.
This is a glaring gap.
Without a plan to develop recycling capacity or export used batteries to countries that can handle them, Pakistan risks trading one environmental crisis for another: cleaner air from EVs, but contaminated soil and water from discarded battery packs.
Pakistan’s EV Policy and the Battery Disposal Gap
The Pakistani government’s push for electric vehicles is relatively new and driven by valid goals – reducing urban smog and oil import bills. A National Electric Vehicle Policy (NEVP) was approved in 2019, setting ambitious targets: 30% of new vehicle sales to be electric by 2030, and 90% by 2040. This was followed by more detailed plans, such as the EV Policy 2020-2025, which offered tax incentives for EV assembly and imports, and the updated EV Policy 2025-2030, announced with much fanfare in mid-2025. Notably, the 2025 policy includes substantial subsidies for electric motorbikes and rickshaws – a recognition that Pakistan’s highest vehicular pollution comes from two- and three-wheelers. Chinese and other foreign manufacturers (such as BYD and MG) have shown keen interest, with BYD even announcing plans to set up an EV plant in Lahore.
In short, the country seems poised on the brink of an EV influx.
However, in the excitement of launching an EV market, one critical piece has been largely missing: what to do with end-of-life batteries. The official policies make only a cursory mention of this looming challenge. The EV Policy 2020 document did contain a line that “disposal of [the] battery to be ensured as it is hazardous for human health”, acknowledging the issue in principle. But this was just that – a statement, not a plan. No specific regulations or frameworks were established in 2020 for battery take-back or recycling.
A 2023 policy brief bluntly noted that “presently, there is no policy or regulation on the proper disposal of EV batteries” in Pakistan. The new 2025-30 policy, presented by the government in June 2025, shows that officials are at least aware of the concern: at the launch, a top advisor emphasized, “We don’t want to create any environmental problem if the battery is not disposed of properly.”
There was talk of establishing safety and recycling standards as part of the policy. Yet, as of now, these remain words on paper – aspirations rather than concrete mechanisms. There is no indication that Pakistan has built (or even begun building) the recycling plants, certification labs, or enforcement agencies needed to handle thousands of depleted EV batteries expected in the coming decade.
This lack of preparation is especially worrying given Pakistan’s track record in waste management and environmental regulation. To put it bluntly, if we struggle to safely dispose of something as mundane as a plastic shopping bag, how will we cope with a high-tech, toxic battery?
Islamabad, for instance, officially banned single-use plastic bags in 2019 and again under updated regulations in 2023. Yet a recent survey found that over 60% of household garbage in the capital was still in polythene bags, the ban honored mostly in the breach. The Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency admits that enforcement of the plastic ban has lagged badly. Similar stories abound nationwide: hospital waste, industrial effluents, electronic scrap – rules exist on paper, but seldom in practice.
Now consider the EV batteries that will start piling up in a few years. Each battery pack can weigh 300–500 kg for a car, or around 50–100 kg for an electric motorbike or rickshaw. They can’t just be thrown in a dump without risking fires or toxins leaking. Will they end up clandestinely dumped in landfills or water bodies, as other hazardous waste often is? Pakistan’s rivers already suffer from unchecked industrial discharges – one shudders to imagine discarded lithium batteries added to the chemical brew. The government could require importers or automakers to take back used batteries (as China is doing) or partner with friendly countries/companies to ship and process them abroad. But so far, there has been little to no public discussion of these solutions.
It is an oversight that could come back to haunt us.
2031 and Beyond: A New Toxic Legacy?
If Pakistan’s electric vehicle drive really takes off in 2025 and 2026, we will likely see the first major wave of EV battery retirements by around 2031 (given a roughly 5- to 6-year useful life for smaller batteries, and 8+ years for cars). That moment is not as far away as it sounds. The clock is ticking: in barely 8–10 years, Pakistan could be facing a grave question – where will all these dead batteries go? Will we have a robust recycling ecosystem, or will we be scrambling to contain a new kind of environmental disaster? The optimistic view is that by then, battery recycling will have advanced worldwide, costs will have come down, and perhaps Pakistani industry could even find an opportunity in recovering precious materials from old batteries. The pessimistic (and more realistic) view, however, is that without concrete action today, 2031 will arrive with stockpiles of expired EV batteries and no safe place to store them.
A touch of irony lingers over this green transition.
We set out to cure our cities of poisonous air and reduce carbon emissions – laudable goals – but if we ignore the full lifecycle of the technology, we might just be trading smog for contaminated groundwater. Is anyone in the government thinking about this now, or will it only become a priority when the heaps of smoldering battery waste start appearing? As Pakistan embraces electric vehicles, it must also embrace the unglamorous side of sustainability: regulation, recycling, and rigorous enforcement.
Otherwise, the EV revolution’s promise of clean energy could fade, and we’ll be left asking, “Where will the EV batteries go? – with the unfortunate answer being: nowhere we would want them to.
