Amnesty International, a London-based non-government organization focused on human rights blasted the Electric Vehicle (EV) industry for selling itself as environmentally-friendly while producing many of its batteries using polluting fossil fuels and unethically-sourced materials.

Reporting from the Nordic Electric Vehicle Summit (via Reuters), the organization warns:

Manufacturing batteries can be carbon intensive, while the extraction of minerals used in them has been linked to human rights violations such as child labor.

Electric vehicles are key to shifting the motor industry away from fossil fuels, but they are currently not as ethical as some retailers would like us to believe.

Amnesty International says that the production of lithium-ion batteries used by EVs is power intensive and many of the plants that make them such as those in China, South Korea, and Japan use coal or other fossil fuels for power generation.

The organization demanded that the EV industry come up with an ethical and clean battery within five years and in the meantime that carbon footprints be disclosed and supply chains of key minerals identified.

Source: Reuters