Electric, but Is It Clean?

A battery-run rickshaw looks clean where we see it. It moves without tailpipe smoke, costs relatively little to operate and has become woven into everyday transport across Bangladesh. Yet much of its environmental and economic cost sits somewhere else: at the charging point, inside the battery and eventually at the recycling furnace. That is why the debate over these vehicles has been too narrow. We argue over congestion, routes and registration while paying far less attention to the system that keeps them moving. On 7 September, Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed told Parliament that Bangladesh has an estimated five to eight million electric three-wheelers. Even allowing for the uncertainty of an official estimate rather than a national census, the scale is extraordinary. The government has begun moving towards registration, driver licensing, QR codes and designated routes, which is sensible. But if policy stops at the vehicle itself, it will regulate what passengers can see while leaving the larger battery economy largely untouched.

Consider the ordinary chain behind a single ride. A driver finishes work, takes the vehicle to a neighbourhood charging point and leaves it connected for hours. Months later, when the battery no longer holds enough charge, it is sold because even a dead lead-acid battery still has value. From there, it may pass through traders and eventually reach a recycler who recovers the lead for reuse. Each step involves money, and each creates an opportunity for informality. The Home Minister told Parliament that electric three-wheelers consume about five per cent of Bangladesh’s generated electricity and that legal charging facilities remain far fewer than the informal or illegal charging points operating in Dhaka. A 2023 peer-reviewed study on electric three-wheelers in Bangladesh found that commonly used lead-acid battery packs can require eight to ten hours to charge. At the scale of millions of vehicles, charging is no longer a private matter between a driver and a garage owner. It becomes an energy-policy issue. Legal charging has to be available, metered and safe enough to compete with the shortcuts people use when the formal system is inconvenient or expensive.

The more troubling part begins when the battery dies. The same 2023 study found that battery packs used in these vehicles often last only nine to twelve months. That creates a constant stream of used batteries entering the recycling market. In 2020, the UN Environment Programme estimated that Bangladesh had more than 1,100 informal and illegal used lead-acid battery recycling operations and found high lead concentrations around assessed informal recycling sites. This matters because lead exposure is already a serious public-health concern. The Bangladesh Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey 2025, conducted by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics with UNICEF, found elevated blood lead levels in 38.4 per cent of children aged 12 to 59 months. That figure should not be misread as evidence that battery rickshaws caused lead exposure in those children. Lead can come from several sources. But unsafe battery recycling is a documented source of contamination, and that makes the contradiction difficult to ignore: a vehicle can look environmentally clean on the road while shifting part of its pollution burden to a community far from the passenger who benefits from the ride.

This is also why raids on illegal recyclers, though necessary in some cases, cannot be the whole answer. The problem is built into the economics of the market. Used batteries are valuable, and informal recyclers can sometimes operate more cheaply because they avoid the costs of environmental compliance and worker protection. If the unsafe buyer can consistently pay more for a dead battery, the supply chain will keep finding its way back to that buyer. A 2026 Stanford Graduate School of Business working paper examining Bangladesh’s formal and informal lead-acid battery economy makes essentially this point: badly designed interventions can push activity toward dirtier processing instead of away from it. The researchers model financial incentives that would make formal recycling more competitive. Their proposal is not a ready-made policy for Bangladesh, but the principle is persuasive. Regulation works better when safe behaviour is financially viable. UNEP had already published a national strategy for environmentally sound management of used lead-acid batteries in Bangladesh in 2021. The unfinished task is to connect that environmental policy directly to the transport sector that is generating such a large and regular demand for batteries.

Bangladesh therefore needs to think of the battery rickshaw as a supply chain, not merely a vehicle. Digital registration can be the starting point, but the system should eventually link the vehicle, its battery and the charging point. Batteries can be made traceable from sale to replacement and recycling. Charging businesses can operate under enforceable metering and electrical-safety standards. Formal recyclers can be given a fair chance to compete for used batteries instead of losing them to operators whose advantage comes from avoiding environmental costs. None of this requires blaming drivers, who simply respond to the prices, charging options and resale market available to them. The state’s job is to change those incentives. Bangladesh’s battery-rickshaw boom is already one of the country’s largest experiments in electric mobility, even though it was never planned as one. The question now is whether regulation will catch up with the full system or stop at number plates and traffic lanes. An electric vehicle is not automatically a clean transport system. Sometimes the smoke has simply moved somewhere we are not looking.
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The writer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at IUBAT and is currently on study leave, residing in Oslo, Norway