Overview
Before any products go through the final manufacturing stages, first it must be refined but before even that, is the stage of extraction and mining for raw materials. Slave labour and child labour are prominent also, in this stage of production
Children as young as 8 are forced to mine for resources that are used to create electronics. In the last four months of 2015, 80 miners died due to collapsing tunnels when mining for cobalt in the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo
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According to a new report from Amnesty International and the African Resources Watch, big tech companies including Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung practise slave labour to source the raw materials used in their product such as cobalt which is a chemical element and essential in making batteries.
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Dangers
Workers dig in tunnels with simple tools and are exposed to large amounts of harmful materials or substances from the rocks the without any protection. These tunnels often collapse which results in injury or death. Indonesia, being one of the biggest suppliers of tin in the world, mining one third of the world’s tin has mines so poorly run that workers die from landslides almost once a week and most mines are found to be unlicensed and unregulated. An estimated 100 people die every year due to unsafe working conditions in Indonesia alone. The mining of raw materials for electronic products including silicon, aluminium, copper, lead, and gold also contributes to increased respiratory problems for workers, such as silicosis, tuberculosis, bronchitis, and lung cancer.
Some of the products we buy today may also be feuling civil wars such as conflict minerals. In the Republic of the Congo, a civil war has been going on for 15 years due to the mining of conflict minerals and the UN’s attempts to stop the fighting have failed despite being the largest and most expensive peacekeeping mission in the world.