31 August 2023 , 21:41
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A city in China has become home to the world's biggest car graveyard where over 100,000 unwanted vehicles are piled high as people turn to electric over petrol.
In the eastern city of Hangzhou, some cars have been left for so long that plants are growing from their boots. Cars have been pulled off the road in their tens of thousands in a bid to curb emissions and they often all end up at the same scrap heap. China produced around six million electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrids last year, or almost one in every three new cars sold domestically, according to Bloomberg. But these car graveyards are an unfortunate consequence of the rapid rise of electric cars.
Aerial view of a junkyard piled high with scrapped vehicles in Hangzhou city (REX/Shutterstock)As China is stepping up environmental protection levels to fulfil its commitment to curbing pollution, an increasing number of pollutive vehicles have been removed from roads and scrapped. Many of the cars are believed to have come from the hundreds of ride-hailing companies that were created in the past decade, taking advantage of government incentives to switch to greener fuel. But after those incentives were slashed, the cars headed to the graveyard after the companies tanked. Bloomberg visited one field in the city that showed around 200 white cars that were mostly once operated by ride-hailing companies Didi Chuxing Technology Co. and Faststep Automobile Management.
A second site had "around 1,000 EVs sat gathering dust.", with some from Ledao Chuxing, a ride-sharing company that shut down earlier this year. Instead of people selling the obsolete models into the second-hand market, it was easier and cheaper to just abandon them in an empty field. Bloomberg also found that many of the vehicles were from around 2017, with some having registration stickers for driving in 2021.
According to local news, the government of Hangzhou promised to dispose of the cars back in 2019, but Bloomberg reports that following their visits in July 2023, there are still tonnes of abandoned EVs all around the city. The car's batteries contain nickel, lithium and cobalt, which are environmentally and ethically costly to mine and produce. Instead of being left to rot, they could be reused in the energy industries. The Atlantic reported similar incidents in 2018 in Shanghai after the city's bike sharing reached its peak and then supply vastly outpaced demand. - resulting in tonnes of abandoned bikes.
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Shenzhen-based photographer Wu Guoyong was one of the first people in China to document the waste that resulted from the fast development of electric cars. "The shared bikes and EV graveyards are a result of unconstrained capitalism. The waste of resources, the damage to the environment, the vanishing wealth, it’s a natural consequence", Wu said.