Almost 90 per cent of the global supply for polysilicon, a common raw material in electronic devices and solar panels, comes from China, and about half of that comes from Xinjiang, the north-western province that is home to the Uyghurs, says Grace Forrest, founder of Walk Free, a charity dedicating to fight forced labour.
The organization has exposed modern slavery, forced and child labour throughout the renewable energy supply chain, with evidence of state-imposed forced labour of Uyghurs and other Turkic and Muslim majority groups in China in the making and supply of solar panels and other renewable technologies.
It has also shone a light on the slave-like conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where cobalt is mined by workers for its use in rechargeable batteries for laptop computers and mobile phones.
“We have an opportunity to build an economy that isn’t coming from colonial lines and yet, right now, a green economy absolutely will be built on forced and child labour,” Forrest says.
“So the message really is, you cannot harm people in the name of saving the planet.”
Walk Free’s latest Global Slavery Index estimated that 50 million people were living in modern slavery – either in forced labour or forced marriage – on any given day in 2021.
I think it would make more sense to replace cost-effective with cheap. It may be cheaper to use a process that makes it likely 80% of the population dies in 35 years, but that’s a huge (non-monetary) cost. The overarching issue is our current economic system ignores those costs that take a generation or more to come due.