Just the poor souls working in absolutely appalling conditions mining spodumene and other things needed for the batteries that have to worry about there health, safety etc.... but as long as the end users feel good, that's all that matters I suppose
Except you won’t want to pay them. You will be walking round in clothes made in foreign sweatshops. Or by exploited foreigners living in Leicester on crap wages. If they were paid what English people expect you would not buy them. No doubt you are possibly using electrical goods, phone, tablet, laptop made in prison camps in China.
Or maybe if greedy shareholders of these companies didn’t pay themselves billions whilst exploiting the people doing all the work paying them a pittance there would be plenty for everyone to earn a proper wage.
Yes. Those greedy communists in China eh? You will get your shoes from John Lobb and clothes from Savile Row no doubt. Are the owners of the Leicester sweat shops billionaires?
Isn't the spodumene mined in Australia? The issue with bad working conditions was with brine-washing in the Congo. Well obviously, it needs to be resolved and regulated to avoid any bad working conditions. The same as the oil industry needs to in places such as Equitorial Guinea and Nigeria. But this is a separate issue from whether battery power is the future.
The big three are Australia, Chile and China, in that order. The highest African country is Zimbabwe, who only produce 4% of the amount Australia produces.
Lifted from International Battery Materials statement on the enviromental impact of their operations The mined ore has 4% usable stuff. "the wastes that are associated with open pit mines, potentially releasing toxic chemicals into the environment" "the gangue (commercially worthless part of the ore) is separated from the spodumene mineral, and the gangue ends up flowing into a tailings pond"............"resulting in a contamination of local ground water with chemical wastes." Roasting and high temperature leaching - "This stage produces the same environmental pollutants as the roasting process" Purification - "These wastes cannot simply vanish into thin air, so they will likely end up in a tailings or wastewater pond." Final purification - "Any waste produced from these purification measures ultimately end up in waste ponds or lagoons." And the best bit - "Each step of the spodumene refinement process produces significant amounts of greenhouse gasses and requires and lot of energy consumption" But hey, why worry? You drive an EV to save the planet. If the above statements were from any other source than a mining/production company, I would have hmmmed and arrred and are ya sure about that?
