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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: 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.