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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: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday December 26 2017, @03:18PM
My wife has a FB friend like that. I donno what she's compensating for, she must think she was Hitler or Genghis Kahn in a previous (or secret) life but she shitposts at least once a day about how much better of a person she is compared to everyone else because she likes some leftist idiocy or another.
Looking at shitty cultures, like what social media produces, and comparing to long lived cultures that must not suck too bad or they'd have died out, its interesting that contemporary social media leftist violates biblical commandments 1 (because likes are God, not God is God), 2 (because you shall not bow down and worship anything such as a post as if it were God), 3 (because you should be kissing up to God not social media), 4 (because at least one day a week you should STFU and stop bragging for likes), 5 (because you should look for guidance from family ancestors not from bragging shitposters on social media), 7 (because most of the single friends I had on FB were using it mostly to assist in fornication), 8 (because repost / retweet), 9 (shall not lie about neighbor friends and family, shit, thats like 50% of my wife's feed, nothing like family feud over facebook), 10 (because the only purpose of showing crap you bought to people you don't care about is to have them covet it). Just saying I'm not necessarily claiming invoking the Catholic Inquisition would be a solely good thing, but I am saying they have a hell of a lot of self selected shitty people from social media to burn at the stake before anyone of quality is lost to the great BBQ.