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posted by martyb on Tuesday October 25 2016, @07:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-many-options dept.

You are probably reading this article on a tablet, smartphone, or laptop computer. If so, your device could very well contain cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo, an impoverished yet mineral-rich nation in central Africa, that provides 60 percent of the world's cobalt. (The remaining 40 percent is sourced in smaller amounts from a number of other nations, including China, Canada, Russia, Australia and the Philippines.)

Cobalt is used to build rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, an integral part of the mobile technology that has become commonplace in recent years. Tech giants such as Apple and Samsung, as well as automakers like Tesla, GM, and BMW, which are starting to produce electric cars on a mass scale, have an insatiable appetite for cobalt. But unfortunately, this appetite comes at a high cost, both for humans and for the environment.

The Washington Post has an in-depth story, THE COBALT PIPELINE - Tracing the path from deadly hand-dug mines in Congo to consumers' phones and laptops. It summarizes the situation:

The Post traced this cobalt pipeline and, for the first time, showed how cobalt mined in these harsh conditions ends up in popular consumer products. It moves from small-scale Congolese mines to a single Chinese company — Congo DongFang International Mining, part of one of the world's biggest cobalt producers, Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt — that for years has supplied some of the world's largest battery makers. They, in turn, have produced the batteries found inside products such as Apple's iPhones — a finding that calls into question corporate assertions that they are capable of monitoring their supply chains for human rights abuses or child labor.

How much culpability do regular people have when they do not have a choice of the source of the components that go into their devices?


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  • (Score: 2) by RedBear on Wednesday October 26 2016, @06:41AM

    by RedBear (1734) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @06:41AM (#418881)

    If you want a humanitarian crisis, the Africans cannot govern themselves and its been lord of the flies savagery since the euro imperialists left, just like it was for eons before we got there, so the only thing more hell on earth for a bunch of villagers than working a mine for money is in a decade when cobalt based batteries are legacy and demand drops back to the floor then they're going right back to AIDS and unemployment and savagery. Sure it sucks working there, but if the alternative is watching your family slowly starve to death because Africa can't get its stuff together, well... maybe selling cobalt to the honkies isn't that bad. Nigeria is going to be a famine hellhole in a decade or two which will be interesting to watch... yeah I know the mines aren't there but the Nigerian refugees will know where the mines are...

    False dichotomy. The alternative to people being treated as slaves, threatened with violence to keep them working and being given non-livable wages is not necessarily starvation. There is of course the other alternative where workers are treated as human beings and are given a fair slice of the proceeds produced by their labor. It may not amount to much more than what they make now, but whether treating human beings as human beings is financially advantageous for us (or for them) is completely orthogonal to whether it is the right thing to do. The fact that a society is already under significant financial duress should never be used to justify slavery, pseudo-slavery conditions or any other unethical, inhumane mistreatment of human beings. We are all capable of being better than that.

    You're also spreading the old "all Africans live in mud huts" stereotype that is getting really long in the tooth. Truth is that Africa is a massively huge continent composed of dozens of different huge nations, and many of them are doing just fine without white imperial rule. There is conflict and there is famine and there is political instability and poverty, but that does not sum up the entire continent of Africa. "Africans" are fully capable of doing a great many things on their own. I think it's time to stop believing the Africa stereotypes you see in TV commercials. Much of what is wrong with Africa in general was actually caused by imperialist colonialism, and much of what continues to hurt Africa is Westerners attempting to condescendingly "help" and doing it in all the wrong ways.

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