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In case it's not widely known, take this as an opportunity to look at the FairPhone http://www.fairphone.com/ that seeks to address exactly this problem.

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For those who want to know a bit more about FairPhone and specifically how they address cobalt mining. They have a pretty good video and a blogpost about the sourcing of cobalt. Blogpost: https://www.fairphone.com/2013/03/14/a-fair-price-for-cobalt... Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWVFXesVScA

Full disclosure: I once worked on a part of FairPhone's webshop.

I like this answer, because it starts proposing a solution (and executing on it). Though I'm not entirely clear what the Fairphone solution is, as the blog post & video seem to be at the fact finding stage. I assume it was through deploying extra on-site inspectors, setting up a union & paying more for the cobalt?

The other issue is that Fairphone has produced 60,000 phones, but Apple has made 700 Million. Can the Fairphone solution scale 10,000x? How does the co-ordination of inspections & unions change if you increase it by 10,000?

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