SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
One of the big changes facing the global transportation industry is electrification. Big corporations and car manufacturers are ditching combustion engines, with Toyota saying it will have an electrified or hybrid version of all vehicles by 2025. But there is a dark side to this revolution.
Cobalt is one of the key ingredients added in electric batteries, and more than half of it is currently mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Amnesty says children as young as seven work in dangerous conditions in Congo cobalt mines.
"At the present time, you'd have to say that there isn't a lot of regulation around the mining of cobalt," says Gavin Wendt, the founding director and senior resource analyst at Australia-based Minelife.
Wendt thinks recent international scandals in the car industry have put pressure on car manufacturers to ethically source the materials needed for their cars.
"We're seeing more and more ... pressure from society to ensure that these commodities are ethically sourced ... A very big issue is going to be where this cobalt will come from, and hence companies are looking to source cobalt outside of the DRC as much as possible," Wendt says.
With 54 percent of cobalt currently coming from the Congo, that goal is still a long way off.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @03:01PM (1 child)
Still, when those same people then start screaming at everyone else about *their* pet "ethical issues" (be it animal rights, global warming, rape culture, diversity enforcement, etc. etc.) it can be fun to rub their noses in things such as these.
Too frequently one's "ethics" is defined as "a sanctimonious way to inconvenience someone *else*", and a tool for uncovering it is useful thing to have.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday December 26 2017, @03:17PM
The usual NIMBY issues on a personal level often appear, or a giant case of "Do as I say and not as I do". But I do agree with that it's usually quite funny cause whatever their cause and beef is one is almost always sure to find that they break their own rules all the time.