“All the way down there are ghostly-looking figures digging for copper, coated in choking grey dust. There are no safety standards. No one wears a hard hat. In the midst of all this, there are some boys … working with bare hands and bare feet. We saw boys standing waist deep in toxic water, washing soil away from nuggets of copper. One, Antoine, told us he was ten.”
Cobalt and copper are not the only metals that children dig for. An Associated Press investigation in 2008 across Guinea, Mali and Senegal, found children as young as four working in primitive gold mines that sold ore to middlemen in the city of Bamako, who then sent the precious metal to two companies in Geneva, Switzerland - Decafin SA and the Monetary Institute.
The pollution from gold mining has also poisoned children that live around the mines. In 2010, at least 284 children under the age of five were killed by lead poisoning in eight villages in Nigeria’s Zamfara state after villagers ground rocks to extract gold.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15706
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