Your iPhone Was Built With Child Labor

SOURCE: The Free Press

"Congo has three-quarters of the world's cobalt, as well as monopolies on coltan and tungsten -- which are vital for batteries and circuits, and enable devices to vibrate. Without all three, there wouldn't be electric vehicles
or smartphones. Big customers include, no surprise, Tesla and Apple. The
open secret, I learned, is that mining relies on child labor. You don't
need to buy a blood diamond to exploit some of the world's poorest and
most vulnerable children -- just an iPhone."

Or an electric vehicle, which may cost you a lot more than a diamond.

"It's impossible to appreciate the steep price of the green revolution until you're there. The irony of our hunger for save-the-world renewables means destroying the fragile environments we never see -- and condemning generations of kids to this new slavery."

The electronic vehicle discussion is "meant to be a green choice in pursuit of climate sustainability goals. Yet it's utterly destructive to the environment of the Congo. Our green energy transition -- migrating from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles -- is built, in large part, from the battery pack standpoint, on the utter destruction of the environment of the Congo. Millions of trees have been clear-cut. Foreign mining companies dump all the toxic effluence from their processing facilities into the water, into the air, the dirt. Everything is polluted."

The interviewee goes on to mention that many companies claim that they are
not using child-labor cobalt in their phones but, as nearly 75% of global cobalt is mined in the Congo, that is a dubious claim.

MORE AT: https://www.thefp.com/p/your-iphone-was-built-with-child
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