nanogirl michelle dickinson: is your cobalt-rich car battery the new blood diamond? - li ion battery cell
Comment: Now that more than our energy in New Zealand comes from renewable sources, it makes sense to adopt electric vehicles.
However, battery technology is an expensive business and the high cost of key metals is driving unethical business practices in the mining industry.
While the movie "Blood Diamond" helped highlight how the money in the diamond mining industry has contributed to the civil war, perhaps the term blood cobalt may be needed to shed light on the growing evidence of child labor in one of the key materials in our technology industry.
The goal of the last national government was to hit 64,000 electric vehicles by the end of 2021.
Since the current number of electric vehicles is just over 13,000, and since about 500 new electric vehicles are registered on New Zealand roads every month, this goal now seems unlikely to be achieved.
For many people, the main consideration for buying a car is cost.
This makes it a challenge to buy electric cars.
Battery technology is expensive because they need to be able to maintain a lot of charge to cover long distances before plugging in again.
One of the key materials that makes this possible is a silver metal called cobalt.
Due to its high temperature and corrosion resistance, cobalt is widely used in the aerospace industry for the manufacture of high temperature alloys for jet engines, and its magnetic properties make it a medical marker for the treatment of cancer through radiation therapy
Cobalt is also used in the cathode of lithium-
Ion batteries play a vital role by stabilizing the cathode structure in the battery, allowing them to charge and discharge at high speed without overheating or producing a large amount of flammable gas oxygen.
Many of your tech devices, for example, contain cobalt, and your smartphone and laptop will use a few grams of metal, but five to 12 kg of cobalt is required for an electric or hybrid car.
Since there is currently no commercially viable alternative to this material, the price of cobalt has almost tripled since 2013, making it more attractive for its mining.
The challenge is that the world's cobalt comes from one of the world's most politically unstable countries, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In the United Nations Human Development Index and the NGO Transparency International anti-corruption index, Congo ranks close to the bottom
Corruption Index.
Many Congolese have no running water or electricity in their homes.
With the increasing need for cobalt to meet our growing demand for electric vehicles and the increase in metal value, an estimated 200,000 people in the poorest countries have been employed, the benefits seem positive for a country that desperately needs money.
Sadly, the extraction of cobalt is not easy, manual mining is used in places where cobalt is manually dug out under unregulated conditions, and more reports record the use of child labor.
In 2016, Amnesty International released a report noting that more than 20 electronic and automotive companies failed to ensure that their cobalt supply chain came from well-managed mines.
Countries like Denmark ban new cars with internal combustion engines, and demand for cobalt-containing electric vehicles will grow at an accelerated rate for electric vehicles.
Just as the public put pressure on the children's sweatshops and blood diamonds in the clothing industry, maybe it's time to start lighting up the electric car industry, to make sure they prove that they used cobalt from a moral source.