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In fairness, the desire to see a new chemistry is not purely an attraction to the new and shiny: https://ceramics.org/ceramic-tech-today/energy-1/pursuing-a-co

by scythe 6y ago

In fairness, the desire to see a new chemistry is not purely an attraction to the new and shiny: https://ceramics.org/ceramic-tech-today/energy-1/pursuing-a-cobalt-free-future-nickel-manganese-aluminum-cathodes-for-lithium-ion-batteries https://ceramics.org/ceramic-tech-today/energy-1/pursuing-a-... > ...the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a country that produces more than 60% of the world’s cobalt. A significant amount of cobalt in the DRC is mined by children...

baybal2 6y ago
And the remaining 40% are not a candy countries either: Cuba, China, Russia. The only standout is Australia. Then, the whole of world's refining, and relevant battery chemical industry is in China.
adrianN 6y ago
It seems to me that the problem is not the chemistry, but the geopolitics that allows using raw materials that were made under such conditions. I bet Congo could get their act together if other countries actually gave them proper incentive.
adolph 6y ago
The linked article’s source is a 2018 Fortune article [0]. As it won a Pulitzer Prize, the article is mirrored on their site [1]. The parent’s linked article claims that a significant amount of the largest cobalt producing area is mined by children. The source article states that industrial-scale output dwarfs the production of the more than 100,000 so-called artisanal cobalt miners which include an unknown number of children. I can’t say that I’m not saddened by thinking of kids, mine or others, mining for a living. The first image that comes to my mind is b/w pictures of Welsh coal mining kids. Stepping outside of my frame of reference, I can see the set of interests that bring about children mining in the DRC. Congolese activists working to end child labor say poverty has driven up the numbers. “Because of the economic crisis, there are about 10,000 of them,” says Hélène Kayekeza Mutshaka, who coordinates a monitoring program in Kolwezi that the government began last year, to try to stop children from mining cobalt. Mutshaka says she faces strong resistance from poor families, who have long sent their children to dig for minerals in order to supplement their meager earnings. “They believe they can try to make it into the middle class if they work as artisanal miners,” Mutshaka says. I’m less sanguine than the article about getting less child labor by moving on from cobalt. The likely scenario is that the industry moves to another similarly rar-ish element and the child miners in DRC move in to another hazardous occupation since the perceived rewards outweigh the risks. 0. https://fortune.com/longform/blood-sweat-and-batteries/ https://fortune.com/longform/blood-sweat-and-batteries/ 1. https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/blood-sweat-and-batteries https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/blood-sweat-and-batteri...

by scythe 6y ago

baybal2 6y ago

And the remaining 40% are not a candy countries either: Cuba, China, Russia. The only standout is Australia. Then, the whole of world's refining, and relevant battery chemical industry is in China.

adrianN 6y ago

It seems to me that the problem is not the chemistry, but the geopolitics that allows using raw materials that were made under such conditions. I bet Congo could get their act together if other countries actually gave them proper incentive.

adolph 6y ago

The linked article’s source is a 2018 Fortune article [0]. As it won a Pulitzer Prize, the article is mirrored on their site [1]. The parent’s linked article claims that a significant amount of the largest cobalt producing area is mined by children. The source article states that industrial-scale output dwarfs the production of the more than 100,000 so-called artisanal cobalt miners which include an unknown number of children. I can’t say that I’m not saddened by thinking of kids, mine or others, mining for a living. The first image that comes to my mind is b/w pictures of Welsh coal mining kids. Stepping outside of my frame of reference, I can see the set of interests that bring about children mining in the DRC. Congolese activists working to end child labor say poverty has driven up the numbers. “Because of the economic crisis, there are about 10,000 of them,” says Hélène Kayekeza Mutshaka, who coordinates a monitoring program in Kolwezi that the government began last year, to try to stop children from mining cobalt. Mutshaka says she faces strong resistance from poor families, who have long sent their children to dig for minerals in order to supplement their meager earnings. “They believe they can try to make it into the middle class if they work as artisanal miners,” Mutshaka says. I’m less sanguine than the article about getting less child labor by moving on from cobalt. The likely scenario is that the industry moves to another similarly rar-ish element and the child miners in DRC move in to another hazardous occupation since the perceived rewards outweigh the risks. 0. https://fortune.com/longform/blood-sweat-and-batteries/ https://fortune.com/longform/blood-sweat-and-batteries/ 1. https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/blood-sweat-and-batteries https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/blood-sweat-and-batteri...