Yes, China provides cheap labor. But their labor prices are rising.

Yes, China has created some enormous messes in their move to a manufacturing country. But they are beginning to establish stronger pollution controls and clean up their messes.

Look at the pressure currently on Apple to improve the treatment of workers who build their products. Look at the local Chinese communities organizing to cut the pollution they’re exposed to. Look at the fact that China just capped the amount of coal that can be burned per year, something that not even the US is willing to do.

I don’t think it legitimate to assume that how batteries were dealt with yesterday is indicative of how batteries will be disposed of tomorrow.
Additionally, I suspect that once we start seeing a significant number of EV batteries totally “used up” it won’t make sense to ship them long distances. More likely we’ll have many small recycling plants spread around countries. This won’t be labor intensive work.

Toyota already has EV battery recycling processes in place.

China is past its “period of poverty”. They are in the process of cleaning up their manufacturing processes. For example, they have hired a US company to help them deal with their rare earth mining/processing waste problems.

Hydrogen today is not clean. It is pulled from natural gas. The carbon in NG is coming from underneath the Earth’s surface when we should be leaving it down there where it won’t screw us up.

Fixing the cost, if we’re talking cracking H2 out of H2O in order to get clean H2, that is a major problem.

First, that would be a very inefficient use of clean electricity. Much more efficient to use electricity to charge EVs.

Second, we’d have to build a total ‘cracking’, distribution and use infrastructure. We’ve got a liquid fuel distribution system and ICEVs. We’ve got the electric grid and affordable EVs seem to be just a few years away.

We don’t have affordable, long-lasting hydrogen fuel cells, so the cost might be sky high.