Media

An archive of articles collected from around the Web

How a Rising Anti-Mining Movement Is Challenging Portugal’s “White Gold” Rush

Date: 29 December 2019

The global transition to renewable energy and electric vehicles — technologies that are currently powered by lithium-ion batteries — is creating a high demand for lithium, popularly known as white gold, among other minerals.

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Chinese metal mines feed the global demand for gadgets. They’re also poisoning China’s poorest regions.

Date: 29 December 2019

DACHANG, China — Day and night, overfilled trucks rumble down Nanjiu Road in the saw-toothed hills that stretch to the Vietnam border. It’s a procession at the heart of one of China’s most hazardous industries.

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Google admits workers making its tech exposed to ‘birth defect’ chemical

Date: 28 December 2019

Concerns have been raised over the safety of workers at factories used by Google were exposed to harmful chemicals amid hundreds of safety violations.

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Mining turned Indonesian seas red. The drive for greener cars could herald a new toxic tide.

Date: 20 November 2019

POMALAA, Indonesia — Where forested hills dip into the sea, Sahman Ukas scoops up rusty-red topsoil. His hands hold nickel that is more concentrated than many of the world’s richest deposits.

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Chad gold mine collapse leaves about 30 people dead

Date: 26 September 2019

About 30 people have died in a collapse at an illegal gold mine in Chad near the Libyan border.

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Silicon Valley Is One of the Most Polluted Places in the Country

Date: 22 September 2019

Microchip manufacturers contaminated the groundwater in the 1980s. Almost 40 years later, the cleanup still isn’t complete.

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Gold mining leaves heart of Peruvian Amazon a wasteland

Date: 21 September 2019

A decade of illegal gold mining in the Peruvian Amazon has left thousands of acres of rainforest a wasteland.

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Global Ban on Exporting Hazardous Waste to Developing Countries Becomes Law

Date: 8 September 2019

Seattle, Washington, USA. 09 August, 2019. Croatia’s 6th of September deposit of ratification of the 1995 Basel Ban Amendment has allowed this global waste dumping prohibition to finally enter into the force of international law.

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Chinese migrant workers suffer the effects of pollution at work and in their living environment

Date: 16 July 2019

Pollution has become a major health crisis in China. With industrial pollution as a significant contributing factor, many workers, especially rural migrant workers who have been exposed to some of the harshest working and living conditions over many years and denied the same rights and mechanisms to rectify their suffering, face a double burden to their health.

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DR Congo copper and cobalt miners killed in Kolwezi

Date: 28 June 2019

At least 36 people have been killed after a copper and cobalt mine collapsed in Lualaba province in south-east DR Congo, authorities say.

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Public Health Burden of E-waste in Africa

Date: 4 June 2019

Environmental impacts from informal e-waste recycling are increasing in Africa.

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Female workers at semiconductor plants face greater risk of leukemia and death

Date: 23 May 2019

Female workers handling chips at South Korean semiconductor plants face a 1.59 times higher risk of leukemia and a 2.8 times higher risk of dying from the disease than for all workers, according to the findings of the first research study on the issue by a state institution. In the case of the non-Hodgkin lymphoma form of blood cancer, the risk of death was found to be as much as 3.68 times higher.

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S. Korean Gov’t Admits “Relatedness of Fatalities and Illnesses” in Semiconductor Industry

Date: 23 May 2019

Workers fell sick and died due to exposure to hazardous chemicals in their chip labs, Korea Workers Compensation & Welfare Service (KCOMWEL) concluded on May 22, after reviewing ten years of epidemiological data.

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Behind the Hype of Apple’s Plan to End Mining

Date: 7 March 2019

There are 118 elements on the periodic table. An iPhone contains about 75 of them.

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Court acknowledges correlation between leukemia, working environment

Date: 29 November 2018

A South Korean court on Thursday ruled that an employee suffering from leukemia after working at Samsung Electronics Co.’s chip production line should be recognized as a victim of an industrial accident.

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Samsung apologizes over sicknesses, deaths of some workers

Source: 23 November 2018

SEOUL–Samsung Electronics on Friday apologized for the sickness and deaths of some of its workers, saying it failed to create a safe working environment at its computer chip and display factories.

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Is your phone tainted by the misery of the 35,000 children in Congo’s mines?

Date: 12 October 2018

My field research shows that children as young as six are among those risking their lives amid toxic dust to mine cobalt for the world’s big electronics firms.

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Report of the Special Rapporteur on the implications for human rights of the environmentally sound management and disposal of hazardous substances and wastes

Date: 10-28 September 2018

The Secretariat has the honour to transmit to the Human Rights Council the report of the Special Rapporteur on the implications for human rights of the environmentally sound management and disposal of hazardous substances and wastes, prepared pursuant to Council resolution 36/15.

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Forced Labor Is the Backbone of the World’s Electronics Industry

Forced Labor Is the Backbone of the World’s Electronics Industry

Date: 28 June 2018

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The Superfund sites of Silicon Valley

Date: 26 March 2018

Federica Armstrong discovered when she moved to Palo Alto, Calif., that Silicon Valley is not what it seems. The world’s capital of tech innovation prefers to keep its superlatives, good and bad, under wraps. Along its Prius-choked roads, it looks like Anywhere, U.S.A.: single-family-home suburbs south of San Francisco, bordered by chain stores, auto dealerships and corporate parks — lots of beige, boxy corporate parks.

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Vietnam: UN experts concerned by threats against factory workers and labour activists

Date: 20 March 2018

GENEVA – UN human rights experts* express their concern about reports that women workers at two Samsung Electronics factories in Viet Nam, as well as labour activists, have been subjected to intimidation and harassment after they raised concerns about working conditions at the plants.

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Exploited and Endangered: Female Factory Workers in Vietnam Open Up About Their Work Conditions

Date: 8 December 2017

45 women in Vietnam divulged the harsh and inhumane factory conditions they face at Samsung plants in a landmark report conducted by IPEN, a Sweden-based organization dedicated to the elimination of environmental toxins, and the Hanoi-based Research Centre for Gender, Family and Environment in Development (CGFED).

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The 73-year-old taking on the tech giants

Date: 27 October 2017

On January 21, the day after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, women around the world marched “for human rights, civil liberties, and social justice for all” – concepts some feared might be endangered under the Trump administration.

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Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics 2017

Date: 17 October 2017

The Guide to Greener Electronics is an analysis of what 17 of the world’s leading consumer electronics companies are doing to address their environmental impacts. Here’s how the companies stack up.

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American Chipmakers Had a Toxic Problem. Then They Outsourced It

Date: 15 June 2017

Results in epidemiology often are equivocal, and money can cloud science (see: tobacco companies vs. cancer researchers). Clear-cut cases are rare. Yet just such a case showed up one day in 1984 in the office of Harris Pastides, a recently appointed associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

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Final Language for SAICM Hazardous substances within the life cycle of electrical and electronic products

Date: 2015

Noting the progress report by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and the Strategic Approach secretariat survey on hazardous substances within the life cycle of electrical and electronic products, which highlight gaps and suggest the need for further work on the upstream and mid-stream levels.

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New Reports Link Electronics Manufacturing Hazards in the US and Globally

Investigations feature work of attorney Amanda Hawes and ICRT

Date: March 2015

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An Open Letter Calling on Samsung to Accept the Recommendations of the Mediation Committee

Date: 23 July 2015

On July 23, 2015, a formal Mediation Committee established at the suggestion of Samsung with the participation of civil society groups issued its ground breaking recommendations to compensate the hundreds of workers who became ill while working at Samsung and to implement innovative prevention policies to protect their workers in the future.

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The Impenetrable World of Mark Flores

Yvette Flores unknowingly worked around lead and other harmful substances while she was pregnant; a severely disabled son was the result

Date: 1 July 2015

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Keeping an Eye on Apple

Date: 7 February 2013

In an interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek in December 2012, Apple CEO Tim Cook stated that ‘Apple wants to be as innovative with supply chain responsibility as we are with our products. That is a high bar’.

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Samsung Seen Covering Up Fatal Gas Leak

Date: 28 January 2013

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. failed to contact authorities for 26 hours after two separate leaks of hydrofluoric acid gas killed one contractor and injured four others at its chip plant, about 70 kilometers south of Seoul, in Jan. 27-28.

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Samsung Plans San Jose Expansion

Date: 18 January 2013

SAN JOSE — Samsung Semiconductor Inc.’s plans to expand the company’s north San Jose research and development site, which Gov. Jerry Brown announced in August at City Hall, are taking shape with submitted designs depicting a cube-like building with open, plant-filled floors and extensive greenery around the campus.

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Think Different, Apple, and Use Excess Cash to Help Factory Workers

Date: 30 March 2012

In 1997, Apple unveiled an ingenious marketing campaign telling us to “Think different.” It included posters of Mohandas Gandhi, Albert Einstein and John Lennon to promote its reputation as the company that cares and is truly different. What a contrast to Apple’s recent announcement on how it will address its $100 billion cash surplus.

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Dark Side of the Chip

Infochange Agenda — India

Date: April 2009

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