Leading electric car makers might be unwittingly using child labor to produce batteries for vehicles that have grown in popularity for using “clean” energy aimed at limiting global warming, Amnesty International said yesterday.
The human rights watchdog said cobalt used in lithium ion batteries for electric vehicles, phones and laptops could come from mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) that use child labor.
It accused car makers including General Motors Co, Renault-Nissan, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, Volkswagen AG, Daimler AG and Tesla Motors Inc of failing to map the supply of cobalt from mines in the DR Congo to smelters and on to batterymakers.
As a result, electric cars sold across the globe could contain traces of the metal produced each year by informal Congolese mines without companies knowing, the group said.
“We have found that there is significant risk that cobalt mined by children could be entering their supply chains,” Amnesty human rights researcher Mark Dummett said.
Due to the growing demand for lithium ion batteries in electric cars and consumer goods like mobile phones, Dummett said automakers have an obligation to trace their supply chain to ensure children were not used to mine cobalt.
“Frankly companies owe it to their consumer to be transparent about their supplies and to map out their supply chains so that they know where it’s coming from,” he said.
More than half of the world’s cobalt comes from the DR Congo, Amnesty said, and 20 percent of the mineral is mined by hand.
The DR Congo’s supply of metals such as tantalum, tin, tungsten and gold has been under scrutiny since 2010, when laws in the US required US-listed companies to ensure their supply chain was free from these so-called “conflict minerals.”
Cobalt has received scant regulatory attention, although the DR Congo, where dozens of armed groups roam its lawless eastern region, is the source of more than half of global supply.
VW told reporters it was investigating whether cobalt in their electric car batteries was mined in the DR Congo.
“To our best knowledge, the cobalt in our batteries does not originate from the respective sources from DRC [DR Congo]. To our best knowledge we had no human rights abuses in our cobalt supply chain,” VW spokeswoman Leslie Bothge said.
Tesla said there was “very little” cobalt in its batteries, adding that going deep into their supply chain to investigate the use of child labor was “both unusual and challenging.”
“We have asked the company in the DRC [DR Congo] that produces this trace amount of cobalt deep down within our supply chain to provide written documentation directly to us concerning their practices,” Tesla spokesman Alexis Georgeson said. “That documentation confirms that child or compulsory labor or human trafficking are prohibited.”
GM said in a statement it has a “zero-tolerance policy” on child labor and other unethical business practices, requiring written compliance from its suppliers, while Daimler said it was investigating the “processes and measures taken by our suppliers to prevent such alleged practices in their upstream supply chains.”
Dummett said although many electric car makers had human rights policies, they were not willing to publicly disclose the steps they were taking, if any, to actively prevent child labor in their supply chains.
Electric car prototypes and plans are growing in popularity, and dominating this year’s Paris auto show, as falling battery costs persuade executives and investors that plug-in vehicles are ready to go mainstream.
“We’re not saying people shouldn’t buy these electric cars,” Dummett said. “But consumers who buy them should expect that these hugely wealthy companies ... absolutely have the capacity to do this due diligence to map out their supply chain.”
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