When Saving the Planet and Human Rights Collide

When it comes to the materials needed to keep our electronics going, there is often a hidden cost.

One good example is in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Minerals dug from the country’s fertile, brown earth are often produced through exploitation. Kilos upon kilos of rocks and water are lifted and filtered each day for a few dollars per laborer, and women are often forced into sex by their supervisors. Children are employed. The term “conflict minerals” was created to show that the tin, tungsten, coltan and other ores being mined are funding an ongoing war.

Efforts have been made for decades to clean up the process through a tagging system that certifies that the minerals were not produced under such conditions. But the certification process has holes, and child and forced labor — as well as environmentally damaging actions like strip-mining — are still inherent in the extraction of many of the so-called clean minerals.

Now, with President Biden’s push for electric cars to make up 50 percent of all vehicles sold in the United States by 2030, what the process actually entails is coming into focus. With a greater need for certain metals, like coltan and iron, and with tax incentives being given to suppliers and manufacturers, some companies appear to be flouting the rules — or outright lying — when it comes to a clean supply chain.

In September, the U.S. Department of Labor released a report saying that there is a risk the minerals being used to power electric cars are being mined by children and forced labor in places such as Congo or China, and that their extraction is destructive to the environment.

In a major case, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit in April against Vale, a Brazilian producer of iron ore, charging that it had fabricated its certificates of safety in the protection of its workers, 270 of whom lost their lives when a dam the company owned collapsed. The tragedy cost not only human lives but also caused “immeasurable environmental and social harm,” the SEC said. Vale also allegedly falsified papers that assured their mining is environmentally sustainable.

As consumers are trying to do something good for the environment by switching to electric cars, the demand for transparency about these possibly contaminated supply chains is growing.

“People care where these things are coming from,” Aimee Boulanger, head of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, a nonprofit that tracks the sustainability of mining around the world, told The Washington Post. “It is hypocritical to say we are here with these electric vehicles to solve our climate problems if, in making them, we contaminate a community’s drinking water or dry up the irrigation wells they rely on.”

The problem is often that the exploitation involved in mining is far removed from the ultimate product. It can be extremely difficult to trace a supply chain that involves fraudulence because one country may mine the minerals, another may process them, a third may use them to manufacture a part, and so on.

“At the end of the day, consumers want to know the product they are buying is not causing undue harm to others,” Nick Nigro, founder of Atlas Public Policy, a research firm focused on sustainable technologies, told the Post. “The industry needs to ensure that in this transition to [electric vehicles], we are not just trading dependency on oil for another bad thing.”