The start of Chinese mines in Africa
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In 2006 China only had a handful of mines in Africa and in just 10 years they have exploded in to more than 120 mines.
Rare Earth elements are in abundance in sub Saharan Africa, and with China's growing place in the global tech business Chinese companies decided to cut out the middle man and just mine the materials them self. WHAT ARE RARE EARTH ELEMENTS? They are any of a group of chemically similar metallic elements comprising the lanthanide series and (usually) scandium and yttrium. They are not especially rare, but they tend to occur together in nature and are difficult to separate from one another |
SIDE EFFECTS |
Children as young as 7 have been seen mining Cobalt for our smart phones. The Chinese companies claim to not know of this but no further investigations have ever been done, The DRC government have not looked in to it either because this is one of their main sources of income.
With the mineral deposits are depleted Chinese companies have been pulling out and just leaving the mines because the clean up process cost hundreds of millions dollars that: 1. Would take a significant chunk out of their profit 2. The DRC doesn't require clean up. |
ACTION PLAN |
There is not much we can do to stop this, its a sad fact but this is just the way things are. There are two obvious solutions to this:
1. Trade embargo's with China 2. Don't buy these smart phones Easier said than done. We all use these products everyday and nobody care about whats going on at least not enough to do anything about it. This is something we just need to except. what we should do is just wait for these mines to die and put money into re building these eco systems. |