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Abstract As a key ingredient of batteries for electric vehicles (EVs), lithium plays a significant role in climate change mitigation, but lithium has considerable impacts on water and society across its life cycle. Upstream extraction methods—including open‐pit mining, brine evaporation, and novel direct lithium extraction (DLE)—and downstream processes present different impacts on both the quantity and quality of water resources, leading to water depletion and contamination. Regarding upstream extraction, it is critical for a comprehensive assessment of lithium's life cycle to include cumulative impacts related not only to freshwater, but also mineralized or saline groundwater, also known as brine. Legal frameworks have obscured social and ecological impacts by treating brine as a mineral rather than water in regulation of lithium extraction through brine evaporation. Analysis of cumulative impacts across the lifespan of lithium reveals not only water impacts in conventional open‐pit mining and brine evaporation, but also significant freshwater needs for DLE technologies, as well as burdens on fenceline communities related to wastewater in processing, chemical contaminants in battery manufacturing, water use for cooling in energy storage, and water quality hazards in recycling. Water analysis in lithium life cycle assessments (LCAs) tends to exclude brine and lack hydrosocial context on the environmental justice implications of water use by life cycle stage. New research directions might benefit from taking a more community‐engaged and cradle‐to‐cradle approach to lithium LCAs, including regionalized impact analysis of freshwater use in DLE, as well as wastewater pollution, cooling water, and recycling hazards from downstream processes. This article is categorized under:Human Water > Human WaterHuman Water > Water GovernanceHuman Water > Water as Imagined and RepresentedScience of Water > Water and Environmental Change
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Legalize text recycling
Key points Text recycling is the reuse of material from an author's own prior work in a new document.While the ethical aspects of text recycling have received considerable attention, the legal aspects have been largely ignored or inaccurately portrayed.Copyright laws and publisher contracts are difficult to interpret and highly variable, making it difficult for authors or editors to know when text recycling in research writing is legal or illegal.We argue that publishers should revise their author contracts to make text recycling explicitly legal as long as authors follow ethics‐based guidelines.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1737093
- PAR ID:
- 10419292
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Learned Publishing
- Volume:
- 36
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0953-1513
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 473-476
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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