You are probably reading this article on a tablet, smartphone, or laptop computer. If so, your device could very well contain cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo, an impoverished yet mineral-rich nation in central Africa, that provides 60 percent of the world's cobalt. (The remaining 40 percent is sourced in smaller amounts from a number of other nations, including China, Canada, Russia, Australia and the Philippines.)
Cobalt is used to build rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, an integral part of the mobile technology that has become commonplace in recent years. Tech giants such as Apple and Samsung, as well as automakers like Tesla, GM, and BMW, which are starting to produce electric cars on a mass scale, have an insatiable appetite for cobalt. But unfortunately, this appetite comes at a high cost, both for humans and for the environment.
The Washington Post has an in-depth story, THE COBALT PIPELINE - Tracing the path from deadly hand-dug mines in Congo to consumers' phones and laptops. It summarizes the situation:
The Post traced this cobalt pipeline and, for the first time, showed how cobalt mined in these harsh conditions ends up in popular consumer products. It moves from small-scale Congolese mines to a single Chinese company — Congo DongFang International Mining, part of one of the world's biggest cobalt producers, Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt — that for years has supplied some of the world's largest battery makers. They, in turn, have produced the batteries found inside products such as Apple's iPhones — a finding that calls into question corporate assertions that they are capable of monitoring their supply chains for human rights abuses or child labor.
How much culpability do regular people have when they do not have a choice of the source of the components that go into their devices?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @08:44AM
Please tell me black young girls were circumcised to produce the cobalt in my phone. Because that would be AWESOME.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @08:47AM
How much culpability do regular people have when they do not have a choice of the source of the components that go into their devices?
Absolutely none! Culpability is a term that implies you are causative of something and bear some share of the guilt. It's like saying all car owners bear culpability for ISIS because they own cars who's gasoline is sourced from countries that spend their money supporting them.
Quit trying to make people feel guilty about things they have no control over. Go to the manufacturers with this if it's bothering you, but good luck with your Chinese.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @08:49AM
Not LUDDITE enough! Shame on you for using APPS!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @11:13AM
Noting your grammatical correction and moving on...
There is a cellphone maker that has made a commitment to avoid blood minerals: Fairphone. [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @11:55AM
Too bad their phone is still filled with proprietary software.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @01:27PM
"Tool Lets You Easily Install Ubuntu Touch OS on Mobile Devices"
Should be on the front page shortly.
It specifically mentions Fairphone as supported hardware.
The tool will install your choice of a few other OSes as well.
...and, of course, you can install compatible apps after that.
.
Now, if you're bitching about binary blobs in the firmware, name something you've found that doesn't have that.
...and ISTM I heard something about open firmware on this thing. [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @05:13PM
I'm missing something here. What was wrong with the grammar in my earlier post?
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday October 25 2016, @12:04PM
Well, ahem, sorry for bringing chemistry to a gunfight or whatever, but somebody gotta mention most of the cobalt based batteries are pretty shitty and are going to be on the dustbin of history "soon enough".
Sorry theres just no other way to put it. They do have good specific energy for those weirdos at apple who specify the quality of a device solely by how thin it is.
They burn really well (LOL the recent Samsung Cigarette lighter), don't last long (which manufacturers love, although I'm not sure its a feature I'd like in a car)
The lifespan thing is a big issue. With heroic effort and circuitry and expense and buckets of good old fashioned American "not give a damn" you can make electric cars and bikes with cobalt based cathodes but for long term automotive style use, titanate and iron phosphate both last forever in comparison and are also much harder to set on fire.
I had done some research when I found I couldn't set some surplus lithium batteries on fire and the problem was like an idiot I was trying to set the wrong chemistry on fire. Apparently the cobalt ones practically cook off on a hot sunny summer day, they're that close to doom... well, its gotta be a desert on a very hot day with some black paint on the battery and no wind, and maybe a kinda weaker battery, but yeah the ignition temp is achievable with mere solar for some shit tier cobalt based lithium batteries.
All lithium batteries have an ignition temperature except the titanate or at least titanate is high enough that last time I looked it was still unknown. I guess "we couldn't make it hot enough in the lab to ignite it" is probably a good sign. All the rest of them blow up at kitchen cooking temperatures. Well, iron phosphate cathodes require the broiler or maybe a self clean cycle, but technically a kitchen oven can somewhere along the lines of easily to barely light all of the cathodes but titanate.
So I'm just saying that much like car nuts have occasionally worshipped strange idols like V shaped multiple heads or hemispherical heads or WTF, if you want to buy an E-Car or whatever that'll run for a decade (or two... or three) you CANNOT use cobalt in the cathode. Of course if you've value engineered the drivetrain such that all 500 ball bearings wear out in 100K or whatever than maybe shitty cobalt based batteries are all you need.
I wonder if this will be an issue for car loans... they're not gonna give joe6pack a 7 year car loan if the cobalt based chemistry means half the batteries will be dead and the car worthless in 7 years.... and insurers are not going to like it if some chemistries are inherently fireproof and others go up like a pile of gunpowder. It may not be legally possible to finance or insure a cobalt cathode based electric car in a decade or whatever, making the whole topic irrelevant.
The whole topic is a tempest in a teapot. Its like freaking out about the automotive revolution a century ago because some cars were steam powered and manufacture of high pressure quartz tubes for the steam boiler sightglass has scaling and economic and human cost issues, when the whole topic is moot because that technology is already obsolescent although it technically still works.
If you want a humanitarian crisis, the Africans cannot govern themselves and its been lord of the flies savagery since the euro imperialists left, just like it was for eons before we got there, so the only thing more hell on earth for a bunch of villagers than working a mine for money is in a decade when cobalt based batteries are legacy and demand drops back to the floor then they're going right back to AIDS and unemployment and savagery. Sure it sucks working there, but if the alternative is watching your family slowly starve to death because Africa can't get its stuff together, well... maybe selling cobalt to the honkies isn't that bad. Nigeria is going to be a famine hellhole in a decade or two which will be interesting to watch... yeah I know the mines aren't there but the Nigerian refugees will know where the mines are...
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday October 25 2016, @01:52PM
Cobalt may no longer be used in batteries in the future, but it is not going anywhere soon from industry. A quick look at Wikipedia reveals the number one use for cobalt is high performance alloys. An easy example of this would be cobalt drill bits, they can chew through mild steel better than anything.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 25 2016, @02:30PM
better than anything
... except carbide. Carbide doesn't like shock cooling that much though so cobalt still wins in practice, sometimes.
The story focus was on batteries, but it does have other uses. None of which are growing, or growing as much as car batteries are supposed to grow.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday October 25 2016, @09:28PM
That's why you continuously cool carbide with a flood of coolant. For dry machining you can also use carbide but at lower feed rates.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Wednesday October 26 2016, @06:41AM
False dichotomy. The alternative to people being treated as slaves, threatened with violence to keep them working and being given non-livable wages is not necessarily starvation. There is of course the other alternative where workers are treated as human beings and are given a fair slice of the proceeds produced by their labor. It may not amount to much more than what they make now, but whether treating human beings as human beings is financially advantageous for us (or for them) is completely orthogonal to whether it is the right thing to do. The fact that a society is already under significant financial duress should never be used to justify slavery, pseudo-slavery conditions or any other unethical, inhumane mistreatment of human beings. We are all capable of being better than that.
You're also spreading the old "all Africans live in mud huts" stereotype that is getting really long in the tooth. Truth is that Africa is a massively huge continent composed of dozens of different huge nations, and many of them are doing just fine without white imperial rule. There is conflict and there is famine and there is political instability and poverty, but that does not sum up the entire continent of Africa. "Africans" are fully capable of doing a great many things on their own. I think it's time to stop believing the Africa stereotypes you see in TV commercials. Much of what is wrong with Africa in general was actually caused by imperialist colonialism, and much of what continues to hurt Africa is Westerners attempting to condescendingly "help" and doing it in all the wrong ways.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @04:06PM
> Quit trying to make people feel guilty about things they have no control over.
Gee, Trump and Sanders have both been talking about trade restrictions. Even Clinton has said she won't support trade deals that are unfair. Why can't one of those restrictions be working conditions and environmental protections in the industries that want to import goods to the US?
You have a vote, right? You can write to your congressional representatives, right?
Than you do have control you are just too lazy to use it. And for that laziness, guilt is the appropriate emotion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @12:01AM
Clinton has a public and a private position, by her own admission. She isn't really opposed to the TPP, especially not after pushing so hard for it previously. What our politicians--including Clinton--want is for the TPP to be passed in a lame duck session.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:49AM
If you participate in the world economy in any way, it's highly likely that some of the money you are spending will wind up in the hands of people who you don't really like. Whether that's in the form of supporters of whichever American presidential candidate you find to be more criminal, or a country that practices female genital mutilation, or sponsors terrorism, or hunts whales, or whatever, every dollar you spend funds something unsavory.
If you want to go live in a commune somewhere that grows all their own food and makes all their own possessions (with no imports from the outside world at all, including things like solar panels and plumbing) then you might be able to almost get away with it, but even they have to find a way to pay property tax.
Frankly I do not think it is even all that noble. Every country goes through a Dickensian phase on its way from subsistence farming to modern economy. (In the US we got black slavery instead). By refusing to trade with them, all you do is prolong that stage of development. The solution isn't even trying to purge the supply chain of morally objectionable methods, but rather to work toward political change in those countries that will make those methods unacceptable to the people in charge there. Otherwise it is just economic sanctions writ small - and as we have seen over and over again (but never seem to learn), economic sanctions have no effect on politics except to make them more entrenched.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @08:48AM
I would feel much better about myself if the cobalt miners didn't earn anything at all and starved instead of having a job and earning very little...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 25 2016, @01:59PM
I would feel much better about myself if the cobalt miners didn't earn anything at all and starved instead of having a job and earning very little...
My view as well. I would go further and say that the best solution to so-called "conflict" metals and gems is to buy more of them. It's time to abandon De Beers propaganda and do what's better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @04:02PM
I would feel much better about myself if the cobalt miners didn't earn anything at all and starved instead of having a job and earning very little...
That's a false dichotomy if I ever heard one.
For all you know the resources given to cobalt mining are misallocated due to bribery or cronyism and could provide a better quality of life if invested in other work that kept more of the wealth in country
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday October 25 2016, @04:29PM
Which will also be misallocated due to bribery or cronyism. You seem to be missing your own point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @04:48PM
No, you seem to be assuming your point.
Just because corruption can happen does not mean it will happen or even happen to the same degree. Different circumstances mean different results.
For one thing, a local industry not based on extracting wealth to enrich foreign owners won't have as much free capital to spend on bribery. When, say, 90% of the wealth generated goes out of country, then an industry that only produces 15% of that wealth but keeps it all in country will be a net win for the local economy despite having 85% less cash to potentially bribe local government.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday October 25 2016, @08:10PM
You can't be serious. You think corruption will go away when the money comes from inside? Or are we misunderstanding each other?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @09:57PM
You are misunderstanding the plain english of my post.
Apparently "happen to the same degree" is too complicated for you to understand.
The more money involved, the more opportunity for corruption. And industry with 85% less money is likely to attract a lot less corruption.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:45PM
You underestimate the human capacity for greed.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 25 2016, @08:22PM
For one thing, a local industry not based on extracting wealth to enrich foreign owners won't have as much free capital to spend on bribery. When, say, 90% of the wealth generated goes out of country, then an industry that only produces 15% of that wealth but keeps it all in country will be a net win for the local economy despite having 85% less cash to potentially bribe local government.
I'll note various problems. First, generating almost a factor of seven less wealth is not a win by any viewpoint. That wealth doesn't vanish down a hole. It enriches other parts of the world which need enriching as well. Second, bribes are local economic activity which you choose to ignore. I can understand why, but given that you're focused only on wealth retained in the country, it is a glaring oversight. Third, more capital for bribing also means more capital for expanding or creating business, and hiring more people.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @10:01PM
> That wealth doesn't vanish down a hole. It enriches other parts of the world which need enriching as well.
Yay! Autistic kallow joins the battle! Enriching other parts of the world is not the job of the locals. Especially when that enrichment is on the backs of their health and quality and of life.
> Second, bribes are local economic activity which you choose to ignore.
Jesus fucking christ, did you just argue that bribes are good for the local economy? Holy fucking hell you are an asshole.
> Third, more capital for bribing also means more capital for expanding or creating business, and hiring more people.
Hey DUMBFUCK when that capital is exported to another country it is not present for anything local.
Jesus fucking christ you are a total fucking dunce. Just delete your account already.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @12:04AM
Yay! Autistic kallow joins the battle!
Are you actually accusing him of being autistic, or are you just using that term as a generic insult? If the former, it's quite foolish to think you can diagnose people with such a thing when you're almost certainly not a psychologist or similar, and even if you were, it would be unscientific to try to do so over the Internet based on someone's posting history. If (and this seems more likely) the latter, then you're just an asshole.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 26 2016, @12:59AM
Enriching other parts of the world is not the job of the locals. Especially when that enrichment is on the backs of their health and quality and of life.
Not the case here, let us note. These people were working in a mine because they were desperate. At least they're better off than starving.
Jesus fucking christ, did you just argue that bribes are good for the local economy? Holy fucking hell you are an asshole.
The earlier poster threw away 85% of the wealth because it wasn't local. So yes, that argument is on the table.
Hey DUMBFUCK when that capital is exported to another country it is not present for anything local.
And when that capital is not exported, because someone decided to expand production in a cobalt mine or whatever, then it is present for local stuff. Funny how that works.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 25 2016, @08:57AM
What, you're saying that this abuse of the workers happened despite, in fact perhaps because of, the freeness of the market they already have - how can that be?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Tuesday October 25 2016, @09:26AM
Impose democracy, you say?
You are unlikely to get the result you seek.
What is actually needed is the imposition of the rule of law, and once people have become habituated to the functioning of reasonable legal and judicial system, then that is the time to allow a fully functioning democracy. Once you have a generation of people brought up without the rule of law, it becomes incredibly difficult to restore order - just look at Somalia. It takes at least a generation of people growing up under a rule of law before democracy has a fighting chance, and even then it is not guaranteed to work. Folk memories and grudges last a long time.
One thing you can argue the British did well with their empire was to leave their colonies (mostly) before law and order broke down too far.
There are multiple ways to impose law and order: invade and make the place a colony; get a UN mandate to govern; use a company of mercenaries to run the place (like the British did with the East India Company and India). No matter what you do, you will come up against resistance: from the international community; and from local warlords who make more money by exploiting the poor than under a rule of law. The Chinese tend to exert power and influence by control of business, and they have very long experience of doing so. Convincing the Chinese to do what the West wants is a challenging objective. In Chinese eyes, we are a flash in the pan compared to the long continuous history of Han civilization. The Chinese usually get what they want, in the end.
It is probably worth looking at Rwanda and seeing how that country is trying to recover from its past.
The issue is not going in with all guns blazing. Any fool can do that, and declare 'Mission Accomplished'. What happens afterwards is the important bit. Look at Afghanistan, and Iraq.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 25 2016, @01:45PM
That's not accurate. That's like saying, "In Roman eyes, we are a flash in the pan compared to the long continuous history of Latin civilization." In one sense they'd be correct, because societies in the West are inheritors of Roman civilization, but it's certainly not particularly continuous nor do most of us think of ourselves as part of "Roman" civilization. Chinese civilization has been quite interrupted over time and Chinese identity has also changed quite a bit. The Mongol conquest of China's various states and the Manchu conquest are a couple examples of disruption to Chinese civilization, and the fact that Vietnamese think of themselves as Vietnamese and Koreans think of themselves as Koreans rather than part of Chinese civilization is an example of how much Chinese identity has changed. It might be tempting to say, for example, well, some form of Chinese has been spoken there all that time, but that too has changed a lot. It's kind of like saying Italians speak a form of Latin, which is to say, well, no, not really.
I don't say all this to criticize, but to dilute the notion that China is a monolith. People in the West and in China often describe that place that way, but it's a very heavy gloss on a very fractious society. Many these days fret about how divided American society is, but, man, that's only one fault line. China has more on the order of a dozen.
We also should take care not to build up China into an unstoppable juggernaut. They are far from that. The unstoppable Chinese juggernaut has spent most of the last 300 years getting its ass thoroughly kicked by nearly every country with two bullets to rub together. In fact they think of themselves as "fallen behind" and chide themselves to not give in to "fall behind-ism." (落后主义, luohouzhuyi).
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:37AM
Nice comment. Some more interesting things about China:
- There are countless local spoken Chinese "dialects" that are mutually unintelligible. Given the definition of "dialect", those dialects are really different languages from a linguistics point of view. They're basically as different as Spanish and Italian. However, everyone knows and can speak Mandarin, in addition to whatever local "dialects" they can speak.
- China was having a civil war when Japan invaded a few years prior to World War 2. Japan in WW2 was really, really racist against everyone who wasn't Japanese, considered the Chinese as less than human, and committed some of the worst atrocities of WW2 -- Holocaust-level atrocities -- against the Chinese. You'd probably expect the Chinese to put the civil war on hold and fight off the horrifically evil foreign invaders, right? Nope. They formed a united front on paper and then continued attacking each other like complete and total fuckwits.
Reagan liked to publicly assert that the Soviets and the US would completely and enthusiastically cooperate with each other in the event that space aliens invaded Earth, because Reagan had some trouble distinguishing movie plots from reality. Well, if he was right about that assertion, and I think he was, then the Cold War-era US and USSR, polarized as we were at that point in history, still had a metric shitload more good sense than WW2-era China.
I'm honestly mystified by this. I don't know how a people could get so consumed with internecine conflict that the most brutal foreign invasion in modern history didn't snap them out of it. I would love to read a well-researched analysis of what factors led to that debacle. My best guess is that it somehow boils down to "Mao was an asshole", because he was, but still.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:16AM
Because of no reason other than the geography of the territory held by the two main factions, the Japanese invasion fell much harder on the Nationalists. The Communists were happy to let the Japanese wipe out their enemies for them, and the Japanese didn't much care who they were killing, so long as they were Chinese.
Let the world burn so you can rule the ashes? That was the Communists' strategy. And in the long run it seems to have worked out for them quite well.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Thursday October 27 2016, @10:01AM
And in the long run it seems to have worked out for them quite well.
For whom, exactly? Mao's remaining top associates were politically persecuted by his enemies after Mao's death. Mao's other top associates were eliminated by Mao during his lifetime in order for Mao not to have to share power. Millions of Chinese died basically by Mao's own hand because Mao intentionally starved them to death. Today, China has a dysfunctional one-party government routinely responsible for gross human rights violations and an economy propped up almost entirely by exports rather than domestic demand and by their one-child policy-created demographic dividend -- which is going to come back to bite them BIG TIME as their population ages. I know Slashdotters tend to think China is some sort of super-efficient authoritarian utopia, but it's not. It's a country with advantages and problems, and its political system is responsible for more of the problems than advantages.
Let the world burn so you can rule the ashes? That was the Communists' strategy.
No, it wasn't. The strategy of both sides was to cooperate, but they failed, stabbed each other in the back, and the result was that China fought less effectively than it otherwise may have been able to. The Communist Party of China wasn't able to magically predict in 1940 that the Allies would ultimately and decisively win World War 2, and, at the end of World War 2, Japan was still occupying a large portion of China, which, btw, the US instructed it to turn over to the Nationalists.
If the Axis had won the war, China would have been even more devastated by Japan than it already was. Perhaps there would have been no more Chinese; perhaps Japan would have administered its own Holocaust against them. Perhaps they would have all been enslaved for generations instead. Perhaps some Holocaust + enslavement combination. You're right that Japan didn't care about the Communists and the Nationalists, but, obviously, had the Nationalists been defeated by Japan, the Communists would have been next. The Communists themselves held very little territory at all at the time and were far inferior militarily to the Nationalists. Japan would have made short work of them.
China's only hope for survival was that the Allies won World War 2. Helping the Allies win World War 2 in every way possible, by fighting as effectively as possible in order to drain Japan's resources as much as possible, should have been the goal of every pretender to the government of China, and really anyone at all in China who cared at all about the future of the country, its civilization and culture, and its people. Because the two sides fought each other instead of uniting to together fight the dire and clear existential threat to China's survival, they were fuckwits.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @10:48AM
(Un)fortunately, the cobalt market isn't controlled by a cartel like the diamonds or oil. All in a very democratic a free market way of course.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday October 25 2016, @10:47AM
Most of our chocolate is produced by child slavery [foodispower.org].
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @12:24PM
A child sex slave dipped in warm chocolate. Sweet.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @01:53PM
I guess continuing to derail: Most of US chocolate is sugar not cocoa. Hell I would not care how many children were indentured if I could get more food in the US that didn't have sweetener as #1 ingredient.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @05:05PM
Knowing this, it will taste all the sweeter next time!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @08:08PM
And chocolate comsumption, Nobel prizes [scientificamerican.com].
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday October 25 2016, @07:35PM
So let's create synthetic cobalt. The real stuff is causing batteries to explode, after all. Can't we make a safer synthetic version?
Wow, I don't even know if I'm being serious or trolling with this suggestion!
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @10:05PM
Yeah, and while we are it, lets make some synthetic gold too!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @11:31PM
go back to reviewing star wars u old bum
(Score: 2) by Techwolf on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:35AM
I would like to buy a LiFePO4 for my devices. They last 10 years and no toxic materials. Does anyone know of a good source of these?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:27AM
http://www.powerstream.com/b.htm [powerstream.com]
http://www.powerstream.com/liprism.htm [powerstream.com]
Beware of "drop in" 12V lead-acid battery pack substitutes. These work, but they're much less reliable than properly managed LiFePO4 battery packs.
Read this first:
http://www.pbase.com/mainecruising/lifepo4_on_boats [pbase.com]
then build it yourself. It doesn't matter if you want the batteries for boats, RV, home solar, DIY electric car, or whatever. I think LiFePO4 is a vastly underrated battery chemistry because most people balance the batteries improperly. But they are not flammable (if massively overcharged they will vaporize their electrolyte which will freak out the fire department but they will not catch fire), tolerate reasonable overcharge, and are generally the most tolerant and easy rechargeable lithium chemistry.