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Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Not by itself, we'll need more than 1 factory. But the whole "impending battery problem" is in itself a bit of a misleading title. Demand for batteries is likely to go through the roof in the next decades. That's not a problem but an enormous opportunity that companies like Northvolt are capitalizing on.

There are many challenges related to battery production and even more companies competing on solving those problems. Sourcing materials like lithium, cobalt, etc. in a sustainable way is one of those challenges and there are multiple companies working on that. It's a solvable problem. It could be as simple as just forcing companies to source responsibly and only work with suppliers that have some really strict policies against using child labor.

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> It could be as simple as just forcing companies to source responsibly and only work with suppliers that have some really strict policies against using child labor.

We can't even do that with coffee, water or palm oil (just to cite these). Cloth/shoes companies are still using child/slaves, most tech product still contain materials mined in very shady mines by kids/slaves in Africa.

"it's simple", "it's just a matter of", "we'll fix it in the future", "it's just an opportunity to find solutions", this is all wishful thinking.

We can if we want to, but right now it is totally voluntary and so left up to brands that want to look good, but also not pay too much extra.

If a block like the US or EU suddenly puts a whole lot of strong regulation on the coffee market, it likely will result in 90% coffee being problem free, but also costing 2-3 times as much and it just isn't as much a priority to be worth that.

And this is exactly why nothing will change, money trumps everything else.

> It could be as simple as just forcing companies to source responsibly and only work with suppliers that have some really strict policies against using child labor.

They are already doing that.

The problem you have is that it is impossible to figure out where an atom came from.

The waste majority of cobalt is mined in traditional large operations. Only a small part of cobalt comes from small mines and only a small part of that is done with child labor.

The major cobalt buyers already work only with the big traditional mining companies. However there is a simply demand for cobalt and somebody will the smaller artistically mined stuff. There are many buyers who don't care.

Cutting out the whole mining sector outside of the large producers would also not be very ethical. There are programs underway to validate and certify some of these smaller mines but there are far to many to seriously do that from the outside.

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