Reducing the need for batteries can help too. Cycling or taking the bus is better than getting an EV.
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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Half as many child laborers digging up cobalt in third world countries is a good start, I guess... But this does nothing to solve the root cause of the problem.
Who's to say when they lose their jobs at the cobalt mines they don't move onto something even more dangerous?
Also this assumes some sort of growth plateau. We could recycle and continue to extract at the same rate pretty easily due to growth.
Solving child labor by recycling batteries is like trying to solve global warming with carbon capture. At best you're just ignoring the cause. At worst you're enabling the worst offenders by providing a smokescreen for them to hide behind.
Exactly. Cobalt does not lose its interesting properties if it is mined in a country with good environmental regulations by unionized well-equipped adults, or even better, robots. What changes is that then it becomes a bit more expensive.
It is the way international trade is organized that is problematic, not the fact that we use minerals.