What is net green?
Calling a product “green” just because it has one eco-friendly feature is easy but misses the bigger picture. That’s why researchers Trevor Zink and Roland Geyer came up with the idea of “net green.”
Think of “net green” as looking at a product’s whole life, from start to finish. It considers how the product is made and used and how it affects people’s behavior. This helps us compare new products to existing ones more fairly and accurately.
For cars, three main factors affect emissions:
- Manufacturing – From mining the minerals to making the car
- Driving – Whether the smoke comes out of a tailpipe or a powerplant
- Recycling – What happens to the car after it’s no longer fit for the road
The concept of carbon debt
Because they have heavy batteries made of rare minerals, manufacturing an EV typically creates more emissions than a petrol car. These differences in manufacturing emissions are also known as carbon debt.
When you drive an EV, going from A to B always creates fewer CO2 emissions than driving the same distance in a petrol car. For every kilometer driven, this difference accumulates CO2 savings that, over time, exceed the emissions from the manufacturing stage.
Once this happens, the carbon debt is paid, and the EV can be considered net green.
An EV Can Be Net Green After 13,000 KM
Although the manufacturing stage of an EV often creates more emissions, over time, the smoke from the tailpipe of a petrol or diesel car pollutes a lot more. According to a report by clean transport NGO, Transport & Environment, your EV can be greener than a comparable petrol car after driving only 13,000 kilometers.
The fastest and slowest way to net green
Many things affect how quickly an EV becomes truly “greener” than a traditional car. These include where the car and its battery are made, how big the car is, and what kind of energy is used to charge it. Want to see how these factors play out? T&E has a handy tool that lets you explore different scenarios.
To arrive at the headline figure of 13,000 kilometers to net green, T&E’s calculations assumed a battery produced with a low-impact supply chain and charged using a renewable energy mix.
This resulted in an EV having 83 % fewer lifetime CO2 emissions than a comparable petrol car.
EVs don’t excel only in best-case scenarios. Even when an EV battery is manufactured in China and charged using a carbon-intensive grid (for example in Poland), it would still be 22% cleaner than its diesel counterpart and 28% cleaner than its gasoline counterpart.
What affects the carbon footprint of your car?
The numbers showing reduced emissions make a strong case for switching to electric vehicles. But it’s important to understand what’s behind these figures. Let’s take a closer look at how EVs really impact the environment.
In the upcoming series of articles, we explore every aspect of EV emissions and how they compare to the carbon footprint of a traditional car:
- Manufacturing emissions and what affects them
- On-the-road emissions of electric and traditional cars
- EV battery recycling now and in the future
- Tips for drivers to make better choices when buying and driving an EV
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