On Thursday, February 17 at 19:30 GMT:
A lot more than six billion smartphones are estimated to be in use around the world, with their pocket-sized electrical power reliant on scarce earths and treasured metals.
Most of us give tiny thought to the origin of the materials that generate our products. But ‘Seven Grams‘, an application that lately highlighted in the New Frontier group at Sundance Film Festival, aims to alter that.
The application blends journalism, augmented actuality, and animation to demonstrate how world demand from customers for ever-quicker smartphones is harming people today in components of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the place minerals and metals necessary for smartphones and other digital products are mined.
It is assumed that about 70 percent of the world’s cobalt is manufactured in DR Congo, substantially of it in the south and east of the country. When multinational mining corporations extract most of this weighty metallic, a considerable quantity is mined by artisans who endure harmful operating conditions. Child labour is commonplace, whilst women usually aid prepare freshly-mined content. Health-related scientists have drawn a url between workers’ exposure to harmful trace factors and start defects in children.
The dangers don’t stop at the rock experience. With DR Congo nevertheless keeping an believed $24 trillion in untapped mineral deposits, some illegal armed teams rely on income from illicit mining to fund their ongoing operations. Human legal rights groups have documented that people same teams have brutalised civilians.
As multinational businesses proceed to depend on exceptional minerals in producing, people in DR Congo have just lately sought to emphasize the affect of mining on them. In December 2019 Apple, Tesla, Dell, Microsoft and Google were listed as defendants in a lawsuit submitted on behalf of 14 families who say their little ones ended up killed or injured whilst mining cobalt. All 5 companies denied obligation. When the situation was eventually dismissed in November 2021, lawyers for the family members have filed a detect of attractiveness.
In this episode of The Stream, we’ll appear at how ‘Seven Grams’ highlights the human toll of mineral mining in DR Congo that is pushed by the world wide starvation for electronic devices.
In this episode of The Stream, we are joined by:
Karim Ben Khelifa, @kbenk
Director, ‘Seven Grams’
sevengrams.org/the-task
Sara Geenen
Affiliate Professor, College of Antwerp
sarageenen.net
Bossissi Nkuba, @BossissiNkuba
Professor, Catholic University of Bukavu
cegemi.com
