Lithium-ion Battery Safety Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Foster of Bath and Lord Winston

2nd reading
Friday 6th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, in principle I completely support the Bill. We must, however, look at the detail more closely. For example, we have to recognise that there are large numbers of different chemistries used to make batteries—the lithium battery is only one such. I was interested to see how we label them so I went outside for a magnifying glass to look at my hearing aid batteries, to see what the chemistry was. It turns out that the label does not tell me. It tells me that they may catch fire if I throw them on to a fire. On the other hand, these might be silver zinc batteries, in which case they are completely safe and unlikely to overheat or cause fires spontaneously.

The problem with lithium is that it is the lightest metal, one of the lightest elements, and is highly volatile. It burns very easily and there is pure lithium in batteries. What happens, as the noble Lord has mentioned, is a kind of chain reaction—the thermal continuation that feeds itself. All batteries will produce heat as part of the energy that they produce, and so produce the seeds of their own eventual destruction if they get overheated.

Clearly, therefore, labelling must be considered very carefully in the Bill. How you keep your batteries might be important. There is no question, for example, that charging a bike with a lithium battery overnight without supervision might be more serious than one realises, but it might be completely safe with many other different technologies and chemistries. One of the issues, therefore, is that the chemistry has to be labelled.

I do not want to add difficulty. Every time we table an amendment to a Bill we make it more difficult to pass, and I do not want to see that happen—this is a good idea and it is important. However, we must recognise, as the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said, that there might be technologies that change things. In the lithium battery you have lithium cobalt on one side, for example—incidentally, the cobalt is there for concatenation, which is interesting given the previous debate—and on the other side at the anode you have carbon, or graphite. The ions pass across and when they reach the anode they oxidise and you get power—and that is a rechargeable battery. There is of course a separator in the middle to prevent that, although at the moment these separators are permeable, not solid, and perhaps, with better technology, one solution would be that if the separator responds to heat and becomes completely solid the battery could not continue in that sort of way. Those sorts of technologies might make a difference. We should not condemn these batteries out of hand whatever happens, because that is something that we might feel important.

There is clearly more need for education about the subject. I will not go on at great length but I want to suggest a few points. I do not know whether my hearing aids have lithium in them; they might be lithium-air, but they have not so far caused my ears to burn while I am sitting by the fire—that happens only when people talk about me.

We have not dealt with something important in the Bill. Lithium is a rare resource. It is difficult to mine and there are not many places in the world where you can mine it. There are many of these technologies, such as silver, and zinc too to some extent—all of these things are precious and we cannot renew them. The noble Lord pointed out in his speech—nobody else has properly pointed it out—that when you come to recycling it is difficult to separate the elements. The problem is that if you take, for example, a hearing aid—it is tiny and one could ask whether worth recycling, but a deaf person using a hearing aid for five years will build up quite a lot of batteries—there are no instructions as to whether we should preserve that material and find some ways of better recycling it. There is more to be done to separate the various metals, and there are large numbers of different metals in batteries that we need to consider. The chemistry needs to be thought about in the future.

I do not think it is part of the Bill, but the labelling is relevant in terms of public consciousness. Above all, we must recognise that if we continue to overuse the world’s resources, such as lithium, we will run out of what could be a valuable element in other ways. That is one of the important points in this issue.

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

I just want to draw attention to the very point that the noble Lord has made about the waste of these materials. If we look at the disposal just of disposable vapes in this country alone, it is estimated that that is the equivalent of throwing away 10 tonnes of lithium each year.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. That would make a fantastic bonfire, would it not? You would not want to pour water on it.

Some batteries do not have that kind of technology. Silver zinc is an aquatic substrate in the battery, so will not get very hot—at least it cannot burn at the sort of temperature of 700 degrees Celsius.

Finally, some years ago I tried to introduce a Private Member’s Bill about the labelling of drugs. I wanted particular labelling—which I will not go into as it is not relevant to the Bill—as I felt that it was missing. The Government at the time were well disposed towards the Bill, and we went through Committee without any problem. However, the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, took me to one side and pointed out that this might affect EU legislation. At the time of my Bill labelling any product would be subject to EU regulation, and it was clear that we would not get it through the EU. We are now, of course, free of that—I am not a Brexiteer by any means, by the way—but there is still a problem about labelling. We must ask ourselves how we can get a decent label on a small package and what we put on it, with some kind of legal advice—maybe even commercial advice—to make certain that we can sell our batteries in the EU. We are trying to expand the industry in this country, with gigafactories and so on. We need to think about it very carefully, as clearly it would be valuable, having made safe batteries, to be able to sell them globally. I commend the noble Lord and support the idea of taking this to Committee.