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Batteries aren’t the only electric vehicle accessories chock-full of critical minerals.
Whenever projections of future electric vehicle demand come up, the conversation will inevitably turn to battery recycling. And for good reason: It takes a lot of expensive, difficult-to-acquire metals and materials to make the big lithium-ion batteries that power EVs, making it environmentally and financially prudent to recover them.
But there is a lot of other infrastructure, materials, and ephemera that come with a big transition to EVs, collectively known as EV supply equipment, or EVSE. Just think of all the charging stations and charging cables that have sprung up around the world, and which will reach the end of their lives sooner than you might think.
The question of what to do with them is the subject of a new partnership between business and academia. XCharge North America, a producer of DC fast chargers, has begun to send its busted and beat-up EV chargers and modules to the recycling group Grensol, which has partnered with researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute to find better, cheaper ways to recycle materials that otherwise would have been sent to the landfill.
“EVSEs have a particularly short useful life due to constant wear and tear, so the need for a recyclable material solution is the driving force behind this partnership,” Grensol’s Rajiv Singhal told me.
EVSE leads a difficult life. The stuff inside the cable endures rapid heating and cooling cycles as electricity races through day after day. This leads to premature degradation, explains Akanksha Gupta, a postdoctoral researcher at WPI. Meanwhile, the polymer material on the outside of the cable, which insulates the electrical components within, is subject to rain, cold, being walked on and run over — whatever the outside world can throw at it.
As a result, Gupta said, EV charging cables last just five to 15 years before they need to be replaced. EV stations are more durable, since their parts are tucked inside metal housing. But even there, specific components that are subject to high stresses wear down and fail after years of heavy usage, sending the entire charging stall to the great beyond.
Some parts we already know how to deal with. The exterior housing of an EV charger is typically made of aluminum or steel, materials that recyclers can already recover in their entirety. Gupta told me there are also existing techniques to recycle cables by (mostly) separating the plastic parts from the valuable metals, like copper.
The materials that are most important to recover, however — because they’re valuable, and because there is a limited supply of them to mine from the Earth’s crust — are also the hardest to get. Gold and silver, which have excellent electrical conductivity and corrosion resistance, are used in printed circuit boards inside the power electronic modules. Tantalum and rare earth elements can be found in capacitors, while tin is used in solders on printed circuit boards.
The electronic module found inside the charging station is a particularly thorny problem, Gupta said.
“Rare earth elements and some critical materials like tantalum and silicon carbide are found in trace amounts and bonded with other metals or plastic components,” she told me. “It is hard to recover and recycle these materials without sufficient economic incentives.” (Estimates for the value of the recycled metals industry vary widely but coalesce around the hundreds of billions of dollars, currently.) “Moreover, during the separation and recovery stages, the elements present in trace amounts can get easily discarded or landfilled, lowering the recovery rate for such materials, which are often of high value.”
The researchers at WPI are investigating new techniques for separating materials and recycling the polymers present in EV charging equipment. Though neither side of the partnership was willing to put a dollar figure or a timeframe to their partnership, the work at hand is as much economic as it is scientific, if indeed it will become economically viable to recycle EVSE. Precious tantalum, for instance, can be recovered as tantalum pentoxide or tantalum chloride depending on the chemical process used, and those two materials each have different markets.
“Our aim is to compare recovery processes for an EVSE station … in terms of both economic and ecological considerations,” Gupta said. “There will be several markets for recovered materials, including the steel and aluminum industry for base metals, the semiconductor industry for silicon, tantalum, and gallium-related products, and the petrochemical industry for polymer-based products, among other industries.”
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Smothered, covered, and recharged.
Picture, if you will, the perfect electric vehicle charging stop. It sits right off a well-traveled highway. It has decent bathrooms, preferably ones that are open 24/7. It gives drivers and road-tripping families a simple way to occupy themselves during the 15 to 30 minutes it takes to refill the battery, the most obvious solution being a meal that can be consumed within that time window.
In other words, it is a Waffle House.
The beloved chain of budget restaurants spread across the American South said last week that it would begin to install DC fast chargers in 2026. Built by BP, the charging stalls will be able to deliver up to 400 kilowatts of electricity and will include plugs with both the Combined Charging System standard (the plug used by most non-Tesla EVs to date) and the North American Charging System standard (the formerly proprietary Tesla plug that is slowly becoming the standard for the industry at large). At last, Americans can get their hash browns smothered, covered, and recharged.
We won’t see every Waffle House in the country become an electron depot overnight. BP said it is planning installations at about 50 sites right now; Waffle House has around 2,000 locations in the United States. Yet the addition of charging — and not just charging, but high-speed charging — at the Waffle House is just what the American EV experience needs.
Where fast chargers are built has been driven by a few factors. Notably, there is necessity from the EV driver’s point of view and practicality for the charging company. Charging depots along major highways and interstates make electric road trips possible, but many prime pit stops between big cities are in the middle of nowhere, which makes it a challenge to provide amenities to resting drivers. In the empty California desert between L.A. and San Francisco, for example, Tesla built Superchargers at iconic steak restaurants and at existing travel plazas with your expected array of gas stations and fast food restaurants. I’ve also stopped numerous times at an impromptu, formerly unpaved site rushed together to accommodate holiday traffic; for months it featured nothing but plugs and portable bathrooms sitting in the dirt.
In cities and suburbs, it’s not uncommon to find charging stations at outlet malls and shopping centers. It makes sense: These places have lots of parking spaces, room for the necessary electrical infrastructure, and stores and restaurants to provide some level of amusement or distraction. If it so happens that you need to go to the REI or Sephora anyway, then so much the better. Mercedes-Benz is trying to class up this setup by putting its luxury charging sites at high-end malls and providing primo, covered parking spaces.
But the game changer is the Waffle House. Businesses have long realized the benefit of adding EV chargers, either as a serendipitous perk for customers who arrive in electric need, or as an enticement for EV owners to patronize their business rather than the competitor with no plugs. Mostly, though, those businesses install Level 2 “destination” chargers that are roughly equivalent to what drivers get in their garage if they pay for the upgrade: 240 volts, or enough to provide 20 to 30 miles of range per hour.
That’s perfect for a hotel, where patrons who snag a charger can wake up the next morning with a full battery, just as they would at home. I made it across sparse Utah country this way. At a grocery store or a restaurant it’s less useful. It’s a pleasant bonus to add a few miles of juice during an errand. What would be better would be filling up the whole battery while you’re inside the Whole Foods.
The problem, however, is timing. Chargers are a shared resource. For optimal EV charging that works for everybody, drivers move their cars as soon as they’re done to open the stall for someone else, which is why many fast-charging operators ding drivers with idle fees if they stay plugged in. So not every activity is a perfect match. It’s pretty annoying to leave your half-filled cart inside Trader Joe’s to go move the car, or to rush through shopping so you finish by the time the battery does. I’ve been through plenty of situations where I couldn’t get back to my Model 3 right away, and so even though it was about to finish charging at 80%, I used the phone app to bump up the limit to 90% or higher to keep the session going.
You know what is a decent match? The Waffle House. You can probably finish your All-Star Special in time, and if you can’t, no problem. This isn’t fine dining; you can leave the table a moment to hop out to the parking lot and unplug the EV.
Putting chargers at the places Americans love to go anyway, whether road tripping or not, would be a wonderful little way to boost their desirability. My native Nebraska has Superchargers co-located with Runzas at towns along the interstate, a welcome trend that must expand. Let Wisconsinites fill the battery while crushing a frozen custard at Culver’s. Give us chargers at the Cracker Barrel so I can finally solve that unholy peg game. Continue the California trend of putting plugs at the In N Out. If the charging stop is someplace you want to go anyway, the minutes required melt away.
Current conditions: The first U.S. heat wave of the year begins today in the West, with a record high of 107 degrees Fahrenheit possible in Redding, California • India is experiencing its earliest monsoon in 16 years• Power was largely restored in southeast Texas by early Wednesday after destructive winds left nearly 200,000 without electricity.
The global average temperature is expected to “remain at or near” the 2-degree Celsius threshold within the next five years, the World Meteorological Organization shared in a new report Wednesday morning. The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement set a warming limit to under 2 degrees C above pre-industrial times, although the WMO’s prediction will not immediately mean the goal has been broken, since that threshold is measured over at least two decades, the Financial Times reports. Still, WMO’s report represents “the first time that scientists’ computer models had flagged the more imminent possibility of a 2C year,” FT writes. Other concerning findings include:
You can find the full report here.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been in disarray since its acting administrator was fired in early May for defending the agency before Congress. His successor, David Richardson, began his tenure by threatening staff. According to an internal FEMA memo obtained by The Handbasket, however, the picture is worse than mere dysfunction: Stephanie Dobitsch, the associate administrator for policy and program analysis, wrote to Richardson last week warning him that the agency’s “critical functions” are at “high risk” of failure due to “significant personnel losses in advance of the 2025 Hurricane Season.”
Of particular concern is the staffing at the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, which The Handbasket notes contains the nuclear bunker “where congressional leaders were stashed on 9/11,” and which, per Dobitsch, is now “at risk of not being fully mission capable.” FEMA’s primary disaster response office is also on the verge of being unable to “execute response and initial recovery operations and may disrupt life-saving and life-sustaining program delivery,” the memo goes on. Hurricane season begins on Sunday, and wildfires are already burning in the West. You can read the full report at The Handbasket.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a religious liberty appeal by the San Carlos Apache Tribe to stop the mining company Rio Tinto from proceeding with its plan to build one of the largest copper mines in the world at Oak Flat in Arizona, which the Tribe considers sacred land. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas said in a dissent that they would have granted the Tribe’s petition, with Gorsuch calling the court’s decision a “grave mistake” that could “reverberate for generations.” The Trump-appointed justice argued that “before allowing the government to destroy the Apaches’ sacred site, this Court should at least have troubled itself to hear their case.”
I traveled to Superior, Arizona, last year to learn more about Rio Tinto’s project, which analysts estimate could extract enough copper to meet a quarter of U.S. demand. “Copper is the most important metal for all technologies we think of as part of the energy transition: battery electric vehicles, grid-scale battery storage, wind turbines, solar panels,” Adam Simon, an Earth and environmental sciences professor at the University of Michigan, told me of the project. But many skeptics say that beyond destroying a culturally and religiously significant site, there is not the smelting capacity in the U.S. for all of Rio Tinto’s raw copper, which the company would likely extract from Oak Flat and send to China for processing. According to court documents, Oak Flat could be transferred to Rio Tinto’s subsidiary Resolution Copper as soon as June 16. In a statement, Wendsler Nosie Sr. of Apache Stronghold — the San Carlos Apache-led religious nonprofit opposing the mine — said, “While this decision is a heavy blow, our struggle is far from over.”
MTA
New York won a court order on Tuesday temporarily preventing the Trump administration from withholding funding for state transportation projects if it doesn’t end congestion pricing, Gothamist reports. The toll, which went into effect in early January, charges most drivers $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th street, and has been successful at reducing traffic and raising millions for subway upgrades. The Trump administration has argued, however, that the toll harms poor and working-class people by “unfairly” charging them to “go to work, see their families, or visit the city.”
The Federal Highway Administration warned New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority that it had until May 28 to end the program, or else face cuts to city and state highway funding. Judge Lewis J. Liman blocked the government from the retaliatory withholding with the court order on Tuesday, which extends through June 9, arguing the state would “suffer irreparable harm” without it. Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, celebrated the move, calling it a “massive victory for New York commuters, vindicating our right as a state to make decisions regarding what’s best for our streets.”
European Union countries agreed on Tuesday to dramatically scale back the bloc’s carbon border tariff so that it will cover only 10% of the companies that currently qualify, Reuters reports. The scheme applies a fee on “imported goods that is equivalent to the carbon price already paid by EU-based companies under the bloc’s CO2 emissions policies,” with the intent of protecting Europe-based companies from being undercut by foreign producers in countries that have looser environmental regulations, Reuters writes. The EU justified the decision by noting that the approximately 18,000 companies to which the levy still applies account for more than 99% of the emissions from iron, steel, aluminum, and cement imports, and that loosening the restriction will benefit smaller businesses.
The famous “climate stripes” graphic — which visualizes the annual increases of global average temperature in red and blue bands — has been updated to include oceanic and atmospheric warming. “We’ve had [these] warming estimates for a long time, but having them all in one graphic is what we’ve managed to do here,” the project’s creator, Ed Hawkins, told Fast Company.
And coal communities and fracking villages and all the rest.
Amid last month’s headlines about departures from the Department of Energy, the exits of Brian Anderson and Briggs White received little attention. Yet their departures foreshadowed something larger: the quiet dismantling of federal support for the economic diversification of fossil fuel–dependent regions of the country.
Anderson and White led the Energy Communities Interagency Working Group, created by a 2021 executive order to coordinate the federal strategy to support coal–reliant regions through a global transition to cleaner energy. This Biden-era strategy recognized that communities where employment opportunities and tax bases depend on fossil fuels face serious risks — local levels of prosperity generally rise and fall with production levels — and they require support to build new engines of economic activity.
In contrast, President Donald Trump’s prescription for fossil fuel communities is to produce more fossil fuels. In addition to cutting clean energy incentives, the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives last week seeks to directly support fossil fuel production by accelerating leasing and permitting, lowering royalty rates, and repealing the methane emissions fee.
History suggests that Trump’s ability to help fossil fuel communities by boosting production is limited — similar efforts in Trump’s first term failed to significantly alter the trajectory of coal, oil, or natural gas output. But the funding cuts codified in the current reconciliation bill could do real harm by dismantling federal programs that support economic diversification. Communities that depend on fossil fuel industries will be vulnerable to severe economic shocks when demand for their products eventually declines.
The need to help transitioning regions isn’t new, but federal support for struggling communities has long been stigmatized. In 1980, a federal commission urged policymakers to focus less on struggling places and more on helping individuals move to where opportunity existed. President Ronald Reagan used this report to justify cutting federal economic development programs, including proposing to eliminate the Appalachian Regional Commission. Congress did not fully abolish the ARC, but its budget was slashed nearly in half, leading to staff reductions and the phasing out of the programs designed to bolster the economy of the persistently struggling region.
In the decades that followed, manufacturing towns were largely left to fend for themselves as globalization accelerated. A study by MIT’s David Autor and colleagues showed that 86% of the manufacturing job losses from trade shocks in the early 2000s were still reflected in depressed local employment rates in 2019. Most workers didn’t find new jobs or migrate.
If the loss of dominant employers causes “miniature Great Depressions” in local economies across the country, then a rapid decline in fossil fuels spells acute risks for communities that depend on these industries for jobs and public revenues. We see this happening already in coal-reliant regions. In Boone County, West Virginia, coal production declined by over 80% from 2009 to 2019, causing the county’s gross domestic product to decline by over 60%. Three of Boone’s 10 elementary schools were forced to close.
President Trump entered office in 2017 pledging to “bring the coal industry back 100%” with a deregulatory strategy much like the one his administration is pursuing today. But during his first four-year term, domestic coal mining employment fell by 26%, and coal-fired power plant capacity declined by 13%, demonstrating the futility of doubling down on an economic model when macroeconomic forces are working against it.
These outcomes are not inevitable. Four-hundred miles west of Boone, the far more economically diverse Hopkins County, Kentucky was able to weather its own 75% decline in coal production without a comparable economic crash. In Germany’s Ruhr Valley, the German government paired a coal phase-out with over €100 billion in long-term investments — new universities, industrial incentives, environmental restoration, and worker retraining. While some towns in the region are still struggling, the Ruhr Valley’s shift from a coal powerhouse to a more diverse, knowledge-based economy shows that fossil fuel regions can reinvent themselves.
Recent policies in the U.S. began to take similar steps. As part of a broader federal place-based economic strategy, the American Rescue Plan dedicated hundreds of millions to rebuilding coal communities in 2021. Then came the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which included billions for cleaning up abandoned mines and orphaned oil wells and funding large-scale demonstration projects for carbon capture and hydrogen production. The Inflation Reduction Act added bonus tax credits and carve-outs to grant programs that target fossil fuel communities.
The now-defunct Energy Communities Interagency Working Group helped knit these efforts together. It served as a clearinghouse for funding opportunities, published “how-to” guides for local leaders, and deployed “rapid response teams” to coal regions.
To be sure, the strategy had limitations. Most programs focused narrowly on coal regions and clean energy solutions, and the IWG had minimal funding for its coordinating efforts. But the strategy shift marked real progress and has generated promising early signs, such as an iron air battery manufacturing facility at an old steel mill in Weirton, West Virginia, carbon capture projects in North Dakota and Texas, and “hydrogen hubs” in the Gulf Coast and Appalachia.
Under the Trump administration, that progress is at risk. Government efficiency initiatives have already led to the gutting of federal programs best positioned to support investments in fossil fuel communities, including the Loan Programs Office, the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. and the Federal Thriving Communities Network Initiative.
Trump’s budget proposes severe cuts to the federal support for regional economic development, including eliminating the Economic Development Administration, the federal agency dedicated to helping communities strengthen their local economies.
The reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives is a step toward codifying those cuts — with reductions in non-defense discretionary annual spending of $163 billion (over 20%) — and it would also eliminate most of the tax credits and grant programs that encourage investments in energy infrastructure projects in fossil fuel communities. Certain policies that are especially well suited for fossil fuel communities, like incentives for enhanced geothermal energy, may be phased out before ever really getting off the ground.
Rolling back support for fossil fuel communities will curb these regions’ opportunities to build new engines of economic prosperity. Without credible, lasting commitments from the federal government, many fossil fuel communities have little choice but to stick to the economic model they know best, despite their vulnerability to the eventual end of fossil fuels.