MacBooks start of as chunks of plastic, aluminum, various wires,
glass, and circuits. Every MacBook also contains large amounts of the ore,
Coltan, or columbite-tantalite. This mineral is mined in several countries in
the world, and is used by every electronic gadget in one way or another. Coltan
for MacBooks was originally mined deep in central Africa, mostly in the
Democratic Republic of The Congo. Besides Oil and water, coltan could very well
be the next most valuable mineral. Much of the coltan was mined in exploitive
ways. The Congolese seeing almost none of the profits from the coltan trade
because rebel groups backed by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda routinely loot the
mineral to finance their own operations. Nowadays, Apple claims to be using
clean, fairly mined coltan for all of its products, which is going a long way
from how it used to be. The new largest miners of coltan in the world are
Australia and Brazil.
MacBook construction, along with the construction of
hundreds of other electronics starts deep in the heart of China, in Shenzhen
province, in a factory known nowadays as iPod city. It takes over 100 people
working 12 hour shifts six days a week to create each MacBook unit. One would
probably imagine that some of the world’s most technologically advanced pieces
of machinery would have been manufactured on a long robotic assembly line, but
instead, it’s almost all human labor creating each and every Mac. The people
work in silence for most of the time, only listening to a loud fem bot voice
yelling OK every time they finish a part. Each person only has a set time to
finish a part of his or her product, before having to send it off to the next
person.
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