by Tesla and Mercedes-Benz scored highest in a new study from Amnesty International, which looks at the work of car manufacturers to improve human rights issues surrounding battery production.
But there is still plenty to improve.
As electric vehicles grow in popularity and market share, so do concerns about the environmental and human rights impacts of mining the metals needed to produce EV batteries.
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For example, metals such as cobalt, nickel and lithium can be mined in countries with few human rights regulations. Amnesty International’s Recharge for Rights report outlines how well car brands “attempt to prevent or mitigate adverse human rights impacts directly related to their activities or services through their business impacts.”
The report shows how well companies are doing at tracking where the minerals and metals in their batteries come from and how they are produced.
Tesla ranked second out of thirteen brands in the survey. But according to Amnesty International, Tesla continues to fail to adequately demonstrate its diligence in investigating the human rights impact of its batteries.
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That said, it scored much higher than brands like Hyundai and Geely Motors.
According to Electrek, Tesla is participating in a new battery passport program that helps map the origins of all materials used in its batteries. More transparency like this will help improve scores.
The Recharge for Rights report suggests that car brands can improve their human rights due diligence rankings by doing the preparatory work to investigate how and where the metals in the batteries are produced and taking steps to prevent any human rights abuses to research.
In addition, to increase transparency, companies should do a better job of publicly disclosing what they discover when examining their supply chains.
The carmakers that are falling far behind in the research “must work harder and faster to demonstrate that human rights are not just a silly phrase, but an issue they take seriously,” Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, told Wired .
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