![]() General Motors, which aims to challenge Tesla’s current EV dominance, said it’s trying to ensure that none of its suppliers use child or forced labor. Michael Posner, director, NYU’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights “One way or another, if you’re a big auto company, a big electronics firm or battery manufacturer, informal artisanal mined cobalt is part of your supply chain.” ![]() And if it’s not mixed together in Congo, a majority of the cobalt is being refined by smelters in China,” he said. “Cobalt mechanically scooped up by these big mining machines is mixed with cobalt people are digging out of the ground themselves and selling on a local market. While their main source is large industrial operations, such as those run by Glencore, intermediaries are selling ASM cobalt to larger producers, Posner said. Tesla and other companies aren’t directly buying cobalt from small mines, but they’re getting it indirectly, according to the study. “You have people coming onto these mine sites with their families, digging a hole in the ground, which is unstable, then sending their kids down the shaft, and shafts are collapsing.” dpa/picture alliance via Getty ImagesĪccording to Posner, an Assistant Secretary of State during the Obama Administration, children are used at the artisanal mining sites because it’s simply easier for them to access the small tunnels and holes. ![]() Tesla lithium-ion battery cells, made with cobalt, on display at the company’s Berlin Gigafactory. Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment on the NYU/Geneva report. The proposal was defeated overwhelmingly in August 2022. Last August, CEO Elon Musk and Tesla’s board encouraged shareholders to reject a proposal that would have required the company to provide detailed reporting on its materials sourcing practices and steps to ensure it was relying on child labor, even indirectly. “Global buyers engaging in a futile attempt to avoid cobalt associated with ASM ignore the inconvenient truth that it is nearly impossible to separate the flow of ASM cobalt from the larger supply of industrially mined cobalt,” Dorotheé Baumann-Pauly, director of the Geneva Center and author of the cobalt report, said in an emailed statement. “The DRC trip provided a more nuanced view of the complex issue of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) and its history within the DRC,” the company said in its most recent report, without elaborating. ![]() Tesla, in its annual environmental impact report, says it has “zero tolerance” for child labor and has sent a delegation from its “Responsible Sourcing Committee” to the Democratic Republic of Congo in the past to inspect mining conditions there. ![]()
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