People might not be quite as jazzed about electric cars if they knew the cobalt in the battery had been mined by children. From Anes Alic at oilprice.com:
There’s a chance that the iPhone you’re about to get for Christmas contains cobalt mined by a six-year-old. There’s also a chance that that six-year-old has been killed or maimed in the processes of mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the lion’s share of the world’s cobalt comes from.
Or, maybe, for those whose Christmas lists are more upscale, you’ll be driving around in a new Tesla next week, with a battery containing cobalt from that same mine.
The EV and electronics revolutions have come at a steep human cost: a boom in child labor in the DRC as child cobalt miners offer battery makers and Big Tech cheap labor.
That’s the focus of the first-ever lawsuit targeting giant tech firms as end-users of cobalt from mines in which young children have died.
Having failed to bring down giant miners of cobalt in DRC, such as Glencore, this time lawyers are going after the end users themselves.
