Fwiw mining and manufacturing isn’t as bad as some people want you to believe.

About 40% of lithium comes from brine extraction. There’s a lot of lithium in the ground which are dissolved in brine - a super salty solution of minerals and water. They’re extracted by allowing the water to evaporate into the atmosphere and then retrieving the minerals from that.

While that “wastes” a lot of water, none of that water was usable in the first place. It’s too salty for humans and would kill any plants or fish if used for crops or dumped respectively.

Another 60% comes from normal hard rock mining. This is as environmentally friendly as most mining is.

A small portion - about 2% - comes from clay mining. This is actually rather bad for the environment and results in a lot of atmospheric pollution. Fortunately, it’s a small shrinking portion of total mining.

The other main minerals in li-ions are cobalt, manganese, and lithium.

A large amount of cobalt comes from artisanal mining in the Congo. Artisanal is just a fancy term that means it’s not work being performed by a company at a dedicated mine, but on a small scale such as a single person digging an area and collecting it or a handful of people who run their own mine. Unfortunately, though, we know that slave and child labor are used at a large portion of these mines.

Fortunately, there has been a large push to move to more sustainable mining practices. Some Congo miners have allowed outside observers to verify that all miners are adults working of their own volition.

Other countries such as Cuba and Indonesia have begun mining cobalt and are also following minimum employment practices. As a side benefit, these mines are also the main sources for nickel which reduces the number of mines we need.

Manganese is rather interesting. The current extraction process involves using natural gas to separate the components. However, there are nodules on the ocean floor which are rich in manganese. While these would produce less pollution to process, there are worries that removing the nodules would cause irreparable harm to the local environment.

However, even if your batteries were mined in the most harmful method possible and your power comes from the dirtiest plant of all time, the long term emissions are still much better than driving the most fuel-efficient ICE over the same time period.