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Mines Linked to Child Labor Are Thriving in Rush for Car Batteries (bloomberg.com)
Metal vital to many electric vehicles has tripled in 18 months. From a report: The appetite for electric cars is driving a boom in small-scale cobalt production in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where some mines have been found to be dangerous and employ child labor. Production from so-called artisanal mines probably rose by at least half last year, according to the estimates of officials at three of the biggest international suppliers of the metal, who asked not to be named because they're not authorized to speak on the matter. State-owned miner Gecamines estimates artisanal output accounted for as much as a quarter of the country's total production in 2017. That's a concern for carmakers from Volkswagen to Tesla, who are seeking to secure long-term supplies of the battery ingredient but don't want to be enmeshed in a scandal about unethical mining practices.
Tech giants including Apple and Microsoft endured bad publicity after a 2016 Amnesty International report said children were being sent down some Congolese mines to dig for cobalt destined for their gadgets. Pit and tunnel collapses killed dozens of workers in 2015, the advocacy group said. Cobalt has tripled in value in the last 18 months as the rise of electric vehicles intensifies competition for scarce resources. Two-thirds of the world's supply comes from Congo, the second-poorest nation. The boom in the metal, currently trading above $80,000 a metric ton, has triggered more mining in the cobalt-rich Katanga region, where sprawling hand-dug mines dot the landscape, and searching for ore is as commonplace as farming.
Tech giants including Apple and Microsoft endured bad publicity after a 2016 Amnesty International report said children were being sent down some Congolese mines to dig for cobalt destined for their gadgets. Pit and tunnel collapses killed dozens of workers in 2015, the advocacy group said. Cobalt has tripled in value in the last 18 months as the rise of electric vehicles intensifies competition for scarce resources. Two-thirds of the world's supply comes from Congo, the second-poorest nation. The boom in the metal, currently trading above $80,000 a metric ton, has triggered more mining in the cobalt-rich Katanga region, where sprawling hand-dug mines dot the landscape, and searching for ore is as commonplace as farming.
I used to think that Slashdot's rating system was kind of wonky, but I grew to accept it. I still think it has issues.
But one think they could do is allow us to filter out ACs as 90% of what they post is unmitigated fucking shit.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Don't get me wrong, children working in mines is horrible. However, they are working there because the alternatives are worse. Closing down these mines or sacking the children will not make their situation better, it will make it massively worse.
Of course, that is too complex a situation for the media and for many people. Hence they demand that child labor be stopped and are thereby contributing to the evil.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Math: ((10000 + 20000) / 2) / (86923 / (2/3)) = 11,5% of the world supply from artisinal mines.
Most artisinal mines are just villages digging their own land to try to get some extra income to lift themselves out of the country's crippling poverty (as the wealth from the big mines has failed to trickle down to ordinary people). But some percentage of artisinal mines will be abusive; call that fraction P. So P * 0,115 = will be the fraction of the global supply that is troublesome and needs to be dealt with. Dealing with it, however, is difficult when there's so much profit to be had by unscrupulous suppliers slipping artisinal cobalt into their supply streams.
Of course, it's not present production that matters. It's future production. Where's that coming from? In the short term, there will be even more from the DRC - albeit in new large mines. Katanga just reopened. 2018 production is anticipated at 11k tonnes per year, and 34k tonnes per year in 2019. Also, Metalkol will start production late this year, ramping up to 14k tonnes per year by 2019.
In the longer term, however production looks to be moving away from the DRC. While cobalt deposits are crazy-abundant in the DRC (cobalt prices could fall to near zero and they'd still produce it as a byproduct of their copper production), today's prices support production all over the world. Eg., in Australia the Skoni project will start in the 2020s, while among the many plays in Canada, First Cobalt is the most interest (near the aptly named town of Cobalt). But it's not just new mines; a lot will be from adding secondary recovery streams to existing mines, like the $500M Vale nickel mine at Voisey’s Bay. Cobalt can be found pretty much everywhere that nickel and copper can be found , but most mines haven't bothered recovering it because of how cheaply it's been coming out of the DRC. But while that will meet short-term demand, the long term is to focus more on mining "cobalt for cobalt's sake", rather than simply as a byproduct. And that'll be the case until the supply curve catches up with the demand curve and prices slack off.
Even mines right "next door" to the Tesla Gigafactory, like Lovelock mine in Nevada, may be opening in a couple years. It's a boom time for the cobalt market.
Point of interest. Offering to shoot us might not work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.
I wonder what percentage of the cobalt in that mine is Cobalt-60.
Exactly 0%, since cobalt-60 doesn't occur in nature.
Real environmentalist understand that everything comes at a trade off. Decisions of course of actions needs to be address the biggest overall harming problem, compared to the smaller over all ones.
Does mining have an environmental impact: Yes
However the real questions are.... Is the Impact from mining less then the benefit from having EVs? Are there steps that can be taken to reduce the impact from mining? What are the costs and benefits from these steps?
We want simple solutions to complex problems. However all the simple solutions probably have been done, the low hanging fruit had been picked. We now need to work on the tough problems.
This means more then a Politicians stump speech targeted at an 8th grade education. Or just raising your hands and giving up because there isn't a win-win situation.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I wonder what percentage of the cobalt in that mine is Cobalt-60. That's some particularly nasty shit with a 7.8MeV photon decay and a half-life of 5.27 years. They probably will die of cancer much faster than global climate consequences.
Wow, you started the paragraph admitting you don't know shit, and yet by the end you've concluded the horrible death of the children.
Congo is sliding back into civil war. The last war there killed more than 4 million people, and was the world's deadliest conflict since WW2. Nearly all the casualties were civilians.
In the last few weeks, fighting has flared up along the eastern border with Uganda and Rwanda. Thousands have died. The world has ignored it.
Yet suddenly the media starts pretending to give a crap about the Congolese because they can put "Apple" and "Tesla" in the headline.
Right. Cobalt, mainly produced today as a byproduct of copper and nickel mining, which gets virtually 100% recycled at end of life, is terrible, but everything that goes into gasoline cars and everything that they burn straight into the air we breathe comes from puppies and rainbows. No, there has never been exploitation over oil production, nosirree! Cobalt (16kg per long-range Tesla Model 3) is mined at quantities up to 1% in the ore, but hey let's forget that the precious metals in your spark plugs and catalytic converters is mined at ~1 part per million quantities. Let's ignore the fact that modern ICE drivetrains are a mix of high-alloy steel (nickel and chromium in particular) and alumium alloys, a lot more than 16kg of them in a typical car, and that these don't just magically pop out of thin air either (not like the steel itself does either). No, no, only batteries are evil! We must not forget this!
Sometimes people will say, "But hey, the EV is heavier! That means it's more resource intensive." Have you checked EV weights lately? Model 3 SR is the same size as, and as fast as, a BMW 330i. Model 3 SR: 1609kg. BMW 330: 1588kg. There's a little more difference between the LR and the 340, but not that much.
But even if we want to pretend that recycling doesn't exist, this is all dancing around the fact that the vast majority of the pollution of a vehicle accrues during its usage, not its production. The comparison isn't even close. And the higher the degree of mass production of EV components, the more efficient their production gets.
Point of interest. Offering to shoot us might not work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.
I set the filter at -1 because some of the other 10% of AC postings are actually informative. Take the post you replied to, for example. While it is offtopic, nobody can seriously claim that it's untrue.
Just so you know - naturally everyone is using this as a chance to pile on Musk, but the Panasonic cells used in the Model S and X get their cobalt from the Philippines, and Tesla is setting up Gigafactory supply contracts with American and Canadian mines. Musk has a personal obsession with physically shortening supply chains.
Point of interest. Offering to shoot us might not work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.
Consumers today unfortunately don't see the true cost of what all their products are. If they did, I sometimes wonder how many things we could stomach. It also seems that unfortunately when something seems "too good to be true" it turns out that somewhere someone paid the price either in environmental damage, or in sheer human lives. I'm not really sure what the ultimate solution is, as consumers the best we can do is to try to be aware of how things are made / built and pick those which least destroy our environment and lives. But that's easier said than done. CFCs for instance were deemed completely safe and they are. Who could have discovered that once it got high in our atmosphere it would destroy ozone which would lead to an increase in deadly skin cancers.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Have gnu, will travel.
Hey, at least children won't be dying of Global Warming, right?
Considering NOAA just got caught fudging the numbers again, I seriously doubt that was ever a real concern. That said, all-electric vehicles are definitely nicer because the smell of combustion engines is unpleasant and we're more or less fucked in the event of any oil supply disruption (for example, most of the oil we use in the US is refined in the southeastern US between a handful of refineries, if those were destroyed for whatever reason the whole system would collapse and even hording gas wouldn't do any good because it goes bad after about 6 months exposed to air.) Electric vehicles are a move toward distributed electricity, production, and stability and distributing that stuff is always good for us in the long run. The rest of the world is inherently our inferior anyway, so who cares how they extract the Cobalt?
Thought Rwanda was 6mil.
About 10,000 people died in the Rwandan Civil War, so you are off by a factor of about a thousand.
About 800,000 died in the genocide that preceded the war, but even that is a tiny fraction of the death toll in the Congolese Civil War ... in which Rwanda was a major participant.