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posted by janrinok on Tuesday December 26 2017, @02:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the downside dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 26 2017, @04:13PM (8 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday December 26 2017, @04:13PM (#614333)

    Unfortunately, I like Tantalum capacitors, Cobalt in my batteries, and Aluminum in my metal frames, and I can't DIY source ANY of those things.

    I can DIY source wood, Saw Palmetto berries, drinkable water, and the occasional game animal - which is a whole lot better than most city dwellers, but the wood isn't much good without metal tools to work it, and the family would die of starvation within a few years if I started hunting all the meat off my land - especially if I had to use DIY made bows and arrows. On the other hand, using only DIY bows and arrows, I might not be able to drive the local game population to extinction, whereas with modern night vision scoped rifles I very well might...

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @04:40PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @04:40PM (#614349)

    You can prolong the life of your tools, fix them if possible when worn or damaged. Buy used stuff. Recycle.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @05:31PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @05:31PM (#614361)

    if you dont kill all the game, but feed them "somehow" then you dont even have to hunt them much.
    also if the other game doesn't see it, then the dinner murdered behind the shed will still consider you a
    non-treat ... just saying.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @05:56PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @05:56PM (#614364)

      Well bears, big cats and wolves generally don't eat humans, but hey anything you can do to not appear like a savory treat is probably a good thing!

    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday December 27 2017, @01:02AM (3 children)

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday December 27 2017, @01:02AM (#614527) Journal

      That's how to do it if you don't want to bother with animal husbandry. In many parts of the world in the past, and now, people build fish traps or weirs and bait them. Easy protein. My mother gets a dozen deer in her yard because she puts out oats; she does it because she loves seeing them and the poor dears don't get enough fodder in the winter, but she could take one here or there and have plenty of meat.

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      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 27 2017, @03:21AM (2 children)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday December 27 2017, @03:21AM (#614581)

        My neighbors put out corn, we've got a regular herd of about 9 does and 3-4 bucks that come through several times a week.

        There are also 100 houses in the neighborhood, and 400 houses in the next neighborhood over - probably 3-4000 houses in the deer's range, so... if everyone takes one doe as needed, the herd will be history on the first day of hunting season.

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        • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday December 27 2017, @12:20PM (1 child)

          by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday December 27 2017, @12:20PM (#614704) Journal

          You could raise chickens, rabbits, or guinea pigs for food (a staple in the Andes they call cui). Or you could do like this prof and raise tilapia and salmon in a trash can [nytimes.com]. I saw a talk of his on Governor's Island and he raised so many salmon and tilapia in a large pair of garbage cans in his basement he couldn't give it away to his colleagues and students anymore.

          It helps to do all those things if you have a house you own, which it sounds like you do. Apartment dwellers in the city aren't necessarily left out, either; it's a fact that people in Brooklyn used to keep pigeons on their roofs and in the attics for meat.

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          • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 27 2017, @02:56PM

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday December 27 2017, @02:56PM (#614746)

            I was trying to remember the movie I just watched with pigeons being kept in cages in the city as a backup food source - it was a documentary: Cuba and the Cameraman.

            Island life tends to include free roaming goats and chickens, which are a sort of natural welfare system: anybody hungry enough can catch and cook one, and it doesn't take too much education, or capital, to start a curried goat stand roadside to earn a little money.

            I disagree that urban dwellers can "make it work" without food import. Maybe if this was a common urban sight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosco_Verticale [wikipedia.org] it could work, but the concrete jungle only supports population densities > 1 person per 40 square meters by bringing in food (essentially, converted solar energy) from the outside. Too much solar energy is wasted on sides of buildings, roadways, parking lots, and other non-food producing uses.

            I'd be curious how much water your trashcan fish man was using, maybe he worked out a closed system, but I doubt that in two garbage cans. I worked with a guy who had a relative who started a tilapia farm outside of San Antonio - followed all the laws, regulations and even incentives for agricultural development. Put in wells to get the water for the fish, San Antonio was at a good latitude and annual weather cycle for open tilapia farming - and he had a modestly profitable fish farm going in a short time. After a few years, the government shut his operation down, bought him out for fair market value, but had to shut him down because his fish were consuming more water from the aquifer than the whole town of San Antonio did. Converting to closed or even semi-closed cycle was not economical in his case, so the buyout went forward and the state did a little revision in their tax incentives for agricultural development.

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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday December 27 2017, @12:57AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday December 27 2017, @12:57AM (#614524) Journal

    It depends what level you want to live at. The closer to the bleeding edge of technology and convenience you want to live, the more compromises you'll have to make. That stands to reason. But most of us can be much more independent, DIY, than we've been taught to believe we can be. In the Golden Age of Reality TV there are a lot of shows now that showcase people who've decided to live off-grid. Their lives for the most part seem a reasonable approximation of what I'd call civilized. If you watch those shows and agree they live pretty well by your reckoning, too, then there's your easy road map to follow and do what they did.

    The TV may be a prime culprit for thinking we need more than we do, though, now that I think anout it. It's always pushing, pushing, pushing to buy more, more, more. Maybe if we switch it off we'll feel less materially unfulfilled.

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