Elon's solution

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

"As you can imagine, iPhones and Tesla cars—which source their cobalt from child slave labor—are a [potential] corporate scandal nightmare"

Tesla can't afford to be tarred by cobalt from mines in the Congo (yesterday's post), so here's their plan to avoid potential scandal:

Tesla says they now get their cobalt from a Japanese company operating in the Philippines. They also claim that the gigafactory (which will supply batteries for the half-million cars Tesla plans to make in 2018) is going to get all its materials from North America.

It turns out that the U.S. hasn't mined cobalt since 1971, but a Canadian company with a commitment to ethical operation plans to start doing that in Idaho - and they will supply cobalt to Tesla.

 

photo: entrepreneur.com

At mining.com, they say that buying cobalt from the Congo is "Elon Musk's worst nightmare." But Elon Musk didn't get where he is by failing to look ahead. So it seems like this is Tesla getting ahead of the problem.

Phone companies are under scrutiny too. Sony, Apple, and Samsung say that they enforce ethical standards on their suppliers.