This is a short video, with beautiful photography, from a New York Times reporter about tin ore extraction, take a look.
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Art & Design Perspectives III, School of Art & Design, University of Michigan
Connie Huang
ReplyDeletePost #2
It’s hard to imagine a place in the world that exists like Ndjingala, Congo. The comment that really hit me was that life there was expensive. How could a place with mud huts, where workers use makeshift backpacks to haul rocks, be labeled expensive? The reporter stated because of the city’s remote location the cost of food is six times the amount it is elsewhere in the Congo. From the photos the city looks like a sea of plastic in the middle of the jungle. And since the location is so remote workers also have to carry the rocks on their back to transfer the tin out of the city. A simple solution would be to build a road! A road would solve the problem of the cost of food and the back aching work the locals go through everyday. A road would make life a lot easier for the people of Ndjingala. But due to political reasons, I bet that solution isn’t even taken into consideration, instead the militia would rather make a quick profit from the mines production. A road would probably speed up production, provide more food for the community, and offer easier modes of transportation for the village. According to the report the tin that is collected from these mines are mainly for solder, used in cell phones and computers. To think that the work these people do an hour is probably less than 5% of the retail cost of a laptop or cell phone is shocking. At the end of the report it is even stated that middlemen buy the ore for as much as 100 million a year. I bet if a $1 was donated from every cell phone and laptop sold a year, a road could be built for the village. All I could think about was the millions of cell phones being used and thrown away today. A picture of a cell phone field came to mind. If the people of Ndjingala saw what their hard work was being used for and then wasted away in the trash, I do not think they would believe it.
I found a great site that gives the life cycle of a cell phone. First the raw materials are mined and processed, the cell phone is manufactured, then cell phone is then purchased and used, then the consumer has the choice to throw it away or recycle it. If the cell phone is thrown away the phone goes into a landfill or incinerator, which isn’t healthy for the environment at all. But if the consumer recycles the phone the phone gets reused/refurbished or recycled while recovering valuable materials such as gold, plastic, and copper. By recycling cell phones and computers we won’t have to rely so much on tin mines out in the middle of the Congo jungle. I realize that this solution would not be very good or the people of Ndjingala since most of their economy depends on the mines but hopefully one day we will reach a level of recycling that we won’t even have to go elsewhere to find raw material and build more mines.
This is a site that gives information on how to recycle your cell phone.
http://www.epa.gov/waste/partnerships/plugin/cellphone/index.htm
I must agree that the photography is absolutely gorgeous. When it’s paired with the sound effects and narration, it feels as if the photos came alive. The reality of a tin miner’s life in Africa is terrible. With a worldwide market so large for tin, one has to wonder why the miners make barely a dollar for something that worth so much in other countries. This is similar to the coffee situation that Professor Trumpey lectured to us a few days ago. A large chain such as Starbucks gets away for charging more than other coffee places even though they all import the same coffee beans at the same price. There are some consumers that are willing to pay more for a Starbucks as opposed to a non-name brand of coffee. One could argue that Starbucks places a greater emphasis on the atmosphere of its café. I, myself, am victim to this marketing scheme. Having been a person who prefers studying in the comfort of coffee shops, it feels only natural for me to purchase drinks from that particular chain. Though, for the most part, I usually don’t buy coffee unless I absolutely need it and it’s not necessarily out of boycott. I simply don’t want to drink caffeine if my body doesn’t need it.
ReplyDeleteHowever, for tin, I don’t even know how many more products are associated with it. Cell phones? Computers? Cars? Is there a possibility that the workers could be paid even a dollar more? On top of a poor wage, the workers have to pay majority of their salary to the high costs of daily essentials. People could at least build these workers a decent road and bridge to walk on, maybe even decent housing. Garbage collectors in America earn a higher wage than a tin miner in Africa.
Daisy
Post #3
Danielle Battaglia
ReplyDeleteWeekly Statement 3
This week’s lecture on recycling really got me thinking of how we can keep recycling, but minimize the energy we use on recycling so that the net gain we receive is larger. I really liked the idea of the Orcelle, or the concept of the cargo ship that is powered by the sun or other means than coal. If this idea could be perfected the net gain from recycling would be huge. We would be sending huge amounts of goods and recycled cargo at no energy cost. Not only will it save resources and money, but also it will be environmentally friendly to the atmosphere and the marine life. However the cost to make this ship will be larger than that of a normal cargo ship, but this is a one-time cost and over time, there will be a net energy and money gain. I am also for solar powered cars, but ships like the Orcelle seem to be the first step towards this, because one ship can have a larger impact than one car, and we can test solar power on a machine that wont crash if the solar power fails.
But what really concerns me is E-waste. There needs to be stricter rules on what is done with it. Now it is still legal for us to export our E-waste to other countries such as India, China, and Africa. First of all, a lot of this electronic waste is toxic, and is polluting these countries and is very unhealthy for the people who live there and dismantle the electronics by hand. This also goes for the kids, who don’t live in great conditions to begin with and are playing in these toxic dumps. But aside from the environmental and health risk, there are a lot of secondary raw materials that we could recycle from the E-waste. Right now there is still about 2% of E-waste in our dumps that is not being recycled. I think all of our E-waste should be sent immediately to factories to be recycled by machines. Also people should try to use their electronics as long as possible before getting rid of them, or give or re-sell them to other people who can use them.
I also see a huge problem with the Pacific trash vortex. There is a large amount of garbage debris and particles caught in the North Pacific Current that is twice the size of Texas. 80% of this garbage comes from land and only 20% come from the ships. It takes about five years from garbage from North America to get caught in this current and about one year from garbage from Asia to get caught in this. The main threat though is the plastic; this isn’t biodegradable and just keeps breaking down until it is small enough to be ingested by aquatic organisms and animals and thus enters our food chain. So basically because of our littering we are not only affecting the marine wildlife, but ourselves as well because we eat the marine life. Steps need to be taken not only to begin cleaning out the waters of the North Pacific, but also to reduce trash that is put into the ocean, especially the plastics. Considering that most of it comes from land, there needs to be some kind of cleanup system along the coastlines of North America and especially Asia. Beaches seem to be the largest culprit of trash entering the ocean. Perhaps much in the same way the South Africa charged five cents for a plastic bag, maybe the beaches charge a certain amount if someone is going to bring a plastic bag or container to the beach area. If they can come up with an efficient way to collect these plastic and garbage particle out of the water, we will have more recycling materials as well.
Penn Greene - The collection of photos taken by Johan Spanner effectively does what much photojournalism does – it exposes us to some terrible part of the world. The miners have horrendous working conditions, but are collecting a material necessary for out – the consumer’s – life. This set of images makes me think not about the miners, but about how many other monstrosities are occur in undeveloped places to support the more developed parts of the world. The high cost of living was a fascinating aspect of this bit of journalism. Because the country’s government isn’t regulating the conditions at the camp, the militia has free reign. Any contradistinction from the militia’s ways would probably lead to violence. The political system and governmental infrastructure in the Congo need to change for places like the tin mine to disappear. This means without a change in the control of the militia the workers will always be oppressed; the militia will always be powerful.
ReplyDeleteIt is incredible how many products we use today that we have no idea where they came from or even how they were made. It is really upsetting that our most valuable and powerful tool today causes so many people to live in horrible conditions and suffer constantly. After this slideshow with commentary about the tin excavation, I have now seen how the creation and the decomposition of a computer affects people worldwide. One part of the world, in the Congo, people are poisoned by fumes from excavating the tin for computers. On the other side in Asia the people there are poisoned by those heavy metals while taking them apart to be recycled. I feel that there should be an international panel that prevents these sort of things from happening. It is not just living below the poverty line, but at a destructive level. We have a United Nations but they only involve themselves when it concerns wars and political/war refugees. What about a different kind of refugee? What about the people who are helplessly forced into hazardous labor that slowly kills them and their families due to their uneducated conditions? There should be such a world committee that either corrects that sort of occurrence, or even strives to prevent it. The preventative measures could simply start at design. A simple re-design in product could have a domino effect in the rest of the world. Tin may not even have to be excavated anymore and the people of Congo would not be forced to quarter in such horrible conditions.
ReplyDeleteEven though there are people who know of these conditions, they feel like their need for a certain product (such as the computer) is too great to start doing something to change it. Those people are usually in high positions of power within companies who would like to keep earning their money and profiting over a 1000 times from the work of the poor people in the Congo. Poor countries such as the Congo rely on the business they get from big foreign corporations to keep their economy going so they will not be the first ones to begin the change. The change begins with the heads of these big companies. Once they begin to ask for change in their production design, the end result will be much, much different.
A course of action for us is to perhaps to all write to our congressmen and ask them to make a new law that prohibits companies from using such exported abusive labor. In order to be able to sell the product, they would have to meet certain requirements – like how tuna needs to be dolphin-safe – materials will have to be human-safe as well.
POST 6
ReplyDeleteJEN SILVERSTEIN
This video was extremely education and disheartening. Although we hear these stories, it is often hard to believe them until you see the faces of the workers and children. Being a photo-journalist who travels through the third world countries documenting the harsh reality of the life style must be a very difficult thing to do. These are people who do the research, see it first hand, and desperately attempt to make the rest of the world listen. Yet so few of us do. It has to be tiring, and very rarely rewarding.
There is 100 MILLION dollars worth of tin a year that comes from the African workers with no rights, little food, and terrible working and living conditions. They don’t get to see even a fraction of the profits. They see disease, famine, and injuries. As an American, I see me Mac Book Pro required by the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan.
I know how terrible the reality of the situation is. It continues in many other countries in African and with different materials, but all the same story. But what can we do about it? As American young adults earning our education, how can I help? I would love to spend a few years of my life trying to make a difference in Africa. In high school I started up a club called “The Elias Fund”, helping to raise money to give African children an education. I looked into a summer program doing community service in Tanzania. My parents were less then thrilled, and shut the idea down immediately.