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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: 3, Touché) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday December 27 2017, @12:45AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday December 27 2017, @12:45AM (#614520) Journal

    That's another excellent example. Should we all make ablutions and say prayers of forgiveness every time we cause electrons to race around and do work for us in our computers and appliances and lights, because they're driven by the agony of coal miners the world over? (We very well could, because coal mining sucks ass. The family went down for a tour in one for 45 minutes in Nova Scotia this summer and we couldn't wait to get out, it was so claustrophobic and awful.)

    If we choose to not do that, then picking on the misery in cobalt mining as a way to get us to hate on alternative energy or electric cars doesn't make much sense, either.

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