Goodbye Gas Stations?; American Metal Recycling is Poisoning Mexicans
and more about the human and environmental costs of renewable energy and digital technology—and how we can do better.
Goodbye Gas Stations, Hello Homes and Gardens?
Here’s a little-noticed but potentially huge benefit of the switch to electric cars: we can start getting rid of gas stations. A huge amount of real estate is currently occupied by these asphalt islands of fuel pumps and convenience stores. Imagine what else we could do with that space! Especially in urban areas, where space is always at a premium, those lots could be converted into housing, shops, parks, community gardens, libraries, you name it.
I’ve been wondering for a while about just how much land is devoted to gas stations, and decided to do a little research to figure it out. The best estimate is that across the United States there are about 150,000 locations that sell gasoline. About 80 percent of them are the kind with on-site convenience stores. Wal-Mart type superstores, truck plazas and other such make up the rest. It seems the minimum size for a gas station is about 10,000 square feet, or a quarter-acre—enough space for pumps, parking, and a little store. But I get the impression most American stations are substantially bigger. The gas stations for sale on this list, for instance, range from about 16,000 square feet to more than 30,000.
Even if we use 10,000 square feet as the average, that means America’s gas stations take up at least 1.5 billion square feet. That’s 34,435 acres—about the size of Bryce Canyon National Park, or more than two Manhattans. Either way: a lot.
But wait, won’t we still need filling stations to charge up our EVs? Sure, but not nearly as many. Unlike gas-powered cars, which require purpose-built stations equipped with elaborate underground storage tanks, you can refuel an EV anywhere you can find electricity—which includes most of the places your car already spends most of its time. 80 percent of EV charging happens at home. And a growing number of parking lots, including those of corporate giants from Walmart to Starbucks, provide chargers. That means driveways and parking lots become much more efficient uses of land, serving as places to both store and simultaneously refuel your car.
We’ll still need dedicated refueling stations on the highways and in remote locations, but the total number will be much lower. Even if we keep half the gas stations we currently have (converting many of them into charging stations) that still frees up 75,000 sizable and conveniently located lots.
There won’t be much to mourn in the passing of gas stations. They are, by and large, unattractive, germ-ridden, pollution spewing crime magnets. Gas pump handles are about the filthiest things you’re likely to touch on any given day. Researchers in 2011 found that 71 percent of gas pump handles were "'highly contaminated' with the kinds of germs most associated with a high risk of illness."
Of course, if you’re a station owner, none of this is good news. Despite their corporate branding, most American stations are owned not by oil companies but by small-time, independent operators. The thousands of jobs that will disappear along with gas stations are another unfortunate cost of the transition to renewable energy. (Along, of course, with the damage done by the hunt for critical metals.) But hopefully those workers will find new jobs in the new Electro-Digital economy, just as thousands of stablehands, farriers and grooms did when we switched from horses to cars.
This new switch is already underway. Electric vehicles sales topped 17 million last year, a new record. And gas stations are starting to disappear. Shell recently announced plans to close down 1,000 American stations. Almost all of the once-plentiful stations in Manhattan are now gone, bought up by developers who replaced them with condos and commercial spaces. Similar story in Vancouver, San Francisco and other places. Meanwhile, nearly a dozen towns in California have banned the construction of new gas stations, and many others are considering doing the same, from Los Angeles to Providence, Rhode Island.
The possibilities for those liberated lots are endless. Micro solar farms? Community gardens? Dog parks? If you’re motivated and creative enough, you can even convert an old gas station into a stylish house! As the pumps dry up, let a thousand flowers bloom.
How American Metal Recycling is Poisoning Mexicans
As I’ve said before, recycling metal is better than digging up new raw materials, but it also incurs serious costs. Britain’s The Guardian and Mexico’s Quinto Elemento Lab have uncovered a hair-raising example of those costs: hazardous waste produced by US metal recyclers is getting sent to Mexico, where it spreads airborne poisons.
It’s a complicated sequence, but in a nutshell: In the US, many junked cars, refrigerators and the like end up in giant industrial furnaces, where the steel they contain is extracted for recycling. Other ingredients like plastic, paint and non-steel metals are ground into dust. That dust contains valuable zinc, but also potentially brain-damaging, cancer causing toxins like arsenic. American companies shipped some 200,000 tons of this dust in 2022 alone to a company near Monterrey, Mexico. That company runs the dust through another furnace that extracts the zinc, but in the process eructs lead, cadmium, arsenic and other toxins into the air. The company says it follows all the regulations regarding these emissions, but researchers found levels of toxins in homes and schools near the facility to be far higher—sometimes hundreds of times higher—than those permitted in the US. The US sending its hazardous waste to poorer countries like Mexico, says a local activist, is “a kind of toxic colonialism.”
Book News
Power Metal (which you can buy right now from Amazon for 17% off !) got some major mainstream media attention this week. I’m still a bit star-struck after this conversation with the illustrious Elizabeth Kolbert on the New Yorker Radio Hour. The click-baity but not inaccurate headline: “One Environmental Journalist Thinks the US Needs More Mining.” Yeah, I said that, and I’ll argue the point with anyone who wants to.
Meanwhile, in a Wall Street Journal review, writer Mark P. Mills was charitable enough to call some of the chapters “fascinating,” but he scoffed at the idea of subsidizing renewable energy. He also completely misread my bottom-line conclusion, which in his telling is “about all of us using far less stuff and especially having far fewer cars of any kind… Never mind those humans who want or need cars.” Not the case. My point, as spelled out in the book, is that we’ll all be better off if we reduce the number of cars on our roads. It’s the sheer number of cars, and the ways they impose on everything else, that makes them a problem. Loads of people need and/or enjoy cars, and that’s fine. I’m not out to take cars away from people who want them. I am out to make it easier for the millions of us who would rather not be forced to rely on cars to get around without them.
Reminder for folks in the Vancouver area: I’ll be appearing with fellow author Chris Pollon at Upstart & Crow bookstore on January 23. Tickets are free, but please register here if you want to come.
More News Worth Knowing
🌊 Trump Administration Could Boost Deep-Sea Mining
🙈 Indonesian Scientist Attacked for Exposing Illegal Tin Mining
Fantastic New Yorker interview!