Toronto, Ontario — The Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) claims in a new report that Ontario’s automotive recyclers remain positive about provincial electric vehicle (EV) adoption despite the need to tackle growing information gaps.
The ICTC’s Fast Charging Ontario’s Electric Vehicle Workforce report “provides an overview of the present state of EV industry development in the province, including critical policy supports and key public and private investments in EV battery and automotive manufacturing facilities.”
While the report offers data related to all levels of Onatrio’s EV ecosystem, when looking at automotive recyclers specifically, overall, recyclers report a positive mindset towards EVs.
The report notes that in data received from an ICTC employee survey, which asked businesses from the post-stream part of the EV value chain how they think their company’s operations will be impacted by Ontario’s EV industry, “the greatest percentage of respondents indicated that Ontario’s EV industry will have a positive impact on the supply of materials needed for production, as well as the demand for their products and services.”
However, the report also highlights how “repurposing and recycling EV batteries (and other materials) requires a skilled workforce that is able to carry out complex refurbishment and battery processing work.”
Moreover, “interviewees also observed how automotive disassemblers working on EVs will need to be relatively more skilled due to the increased complexity of EV disassembly when compared to disassemblers working on internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.”
Interviewees noted that “EV disassemblers will need to have superior skills in disassembly, technical documentation and attention to detail. EV disassemblers will also need to have significant knowledge of the different models of EVs that they commonly encounter on the job.”
However, despite these knowledge gaps, the report concludes that “when compared to the other parts of the EV ecosystem in Ontario, (changes for auto recyclers) have a longer lead time and EVs on the road today still have many years left in their useful lives.” So, “the automotive industry still has some time to adapt.”
To read ICTC’s full Fast Charging industry report, click here.
