Comment on Mining is an environmental and human rights nightmare. Battery recycling can ease that.
RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Half as many child laborers digging up cobalt in this world countries is a good start, I guess… But this does nothing to solve the root cause it 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.
keepthepace@slrpnk.net 4 weeks ago
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.