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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: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday December 26 2017, @03:37PM
One doesn't make such people less desperate by taking away their livelihoods. One thing that we should accept here is that the very jobs which are being criticized here are the primary way that such people will improve their lives. I don't wish to completely discourage so-called "ethical sourcing" because that does have some potential to improve peoples' lives faster than the present course (for example, it's not that big a hit to pay those workers a little more or implement measures which are low lying fruit to make their work environment safer and less hazardous). But it's very easy for large masses of clueless people to make matters much worse by disrupting the trade that makes desperate peoples' lives better. Rural Congo is not going to be able to afford the virtue signaling of the developed world.