Electric Vehicles and Human Rights: The Other Side of the Mineral Supply Chain
Last year in 2024, I moved to San Francisco from Tokyo. It was my first time setting foot in California, but after five years in the automotive industry, I’d long been watching this market from afar. California has always been a benchmark for electric vehicle (EV) adoption—one of the fastest-moving and most influential markets in the world.
What struck me immediately, riding an Uber from SFO, was how normal EV had become. On the freeway, EVs were everywhere. The future I’d been tracking from across the Pacific was now part of my daily view.
But it wasn’t just the EVs I noticed. Just blocks away from tech campuses and glossy electric cars, I saw tent-lined sidewalks and people sleeping in doorways. The homelessness crisis in San Francisco is impossible to ignore—and it sits in stark contrast to the city’s global image as a center of innovation and sustainability.
California’s shift toward EVs makes sense. More than half the state’s electricity now comes from renewable sources, and public support for climate action runs deep – Zero-Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate, which requires automakers to sell an increasing percentage of electric or hydrogen-powered vehicles and aims to phase out new gas-powered car sales by 2035. But when we talk about sustainability, we need to ask: sustainable for whom?
We can’t afford to look only at carbon emissions. Sustainability has to include human dignity, economic justice, and transparency—not just clean energy or high-tech solutions.
Where Clean Tech Gets Dirty
EVs don’t just appear. Behind every battery is a supply chain that relies on critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, and nickel. These materials are essential—but they’re also limited, and they come with significant human and environmental costs.
In some parts of the world, mining operations depend on child labor or forced labor. Others operate in conflict zones where control over mineral resources drives violence and instability. As demand for EVs grows, so does pressure on Indigenous lands, where mining leads to displacement, environmental destruction, and the erosion of community rights. Local populations often gain little while bearing the brunt of extraction.
And the supply chain? It’s long, complex, and opaque. These minerals are mined in one country, processed in another, assembled somewhere else, and eventually installed into vehicles sold in yet another market. By the time a consumer sees the final product, the human stories behind it have been erased.
We celebrate the environmental benefits of EVs, but we rarely ask: how were these cars made—and at what cost to the people and communities along the way?
The Visibility Gap
At the Center for Responsible Business’s Human Rights & Business series, we’ve explored these tensions across sectors such as the beverage industry, with voices like Smruti Govan from PepsiCo. Human rights concerns often surface in industries like apparel or food, where consumer awareness is growing.
Take chocolate. Many people now recognize the labor issues tied to cocoa farming. Certifications like “Fair Trade” have become familiar, giving consumers a way to connect their purchase to ethical practices. When we eat a piece of chocolate, we can imagine the farm it came from and the hands that harvested it.
Now think about EVs. What we see is the sleek exterior of a car. But how many people realize that underneath the seats lies a battery pack—filled with modules and cells made from those minerals?
Who mined the cobalt inside? Under what conditions? What damage was done to communities or ecosystems to source it?
That’s the visibility gap. We’ve accepted “clean tech” as an inherently good thing, without examining the full life cycle of the materials involved. The labor abuses, land rights violations, and environmental destruction embedded in these products are often invisible—not because they aren’t real, but because they’re buried in global supply chains that weren’t built to be transparent.
Regulation Isn’t Enough—Consumers Matter, Too
Governments are starting to act. In the EU, regulations like the Battery Regulation require companies to address human rights and environmental risks in their supply chains. Frameworks like the OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas and the Responsible Minerals Initiative offer support for doing this responsibly.
But regulation moves slowly—and on its own, it’s not enough. Real change also depends on consumer awareness and pressure.
When people start asking where materials come from and who is affected, companies have to listen. Public demand for ethical practices pushes businesses to go beyond compliance and take responsibility for the full impact of their products.
If we want a truly sustainable future, climate action must go hand-in-hand with human rights. That means not only regulating supply chains—but making them visible, and holding them accountable.
The Other Side of Progress
Everything has two sides. Where there is clean, there is dirty. Where there is innovation, there can also be exploitation.
As someone who crossed sectors—from business consulting to public policy— by crossing the oceans —from Tokyo to California, I’ve come to see the duality embedded in progress. Yes, EVs are critical for decarbonizing transportation. But we can’t ignore the other side of the story: the laborers, the displaced communities, the invisible hands behind the minerals.
It’s easy to say EVs are good for the environment. But why do we care about the environment in the first place? For human well-being. And if that’s our goal, then we cannot turn away from the human suffering built into the foundations of “clean” technology.
True sustainability means no one gets left behind—not in the name of climate, not in the name of innovation, not ever.
One way to move toward a truly sustainable future is to keep these conversations going. Our Business and Human Rights series at Berkeley creates space to explore exactly these questions—how innovation, policy, and ethics can come together to shape a future that protects both the planet and the people on it.
We all have a role to play—not just in asking where our products come from, but in imagining what kind of future we want to build.
About the Author: Maho Hayashi is an active member of the CRB Student Advisory Board and and a first year graduate student in the Master of Development Practice program at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. She has a background in consulting and research across sustainability, human rights, and industrial development. Prior to Berkeley, she worked at Arthur D. Little in Tokyo, leading projects on battery material human rights and environmental due diligence. She has also worked on SDG-related initiatives at Tokyo University of the Arts and during her undergraduate studies at Keio University in Japan.
