The original publication of the project is embedded below. Underneath, find the full text.

Gothenburg, Sweden

The hum of voices is rising at the eCar expo in Gothenburg. The future is on full display, radiating an almost magnetic glow.

Smart utility vehicles jostle for space alongside visionary concept vehicles. Established brands undergoing transformation stand next to new ones whose names people have barely learned.

Buzzwords are thrown at visitors:

Innovation

Technology

Sustainability

POLAROID BOX

eCar Expo
Gothenburg, Sweden

People queue to get their hands on the wheel and breathe in the new car scent. Sales reps answer questions about electric performance and acceleration.

But no one talks about the minerals.

END POLAROID BOX

POLAROID BOX

Mica Mines

Bevia, Madagascar

We travel to Madagascar, where 13-year-old Laha and other children mine the mica essential to the electric vehicle industry.

END POLAROID BOX

There is a zero point where the story begins—beyond the winding road through the thickets of cacti.

Across the sandbanks to an almost dried-up river, at the foot of a low mountain rising like a shadow over a scorched plain.

6,054 miles from Gothenburg. 24º56’ south on the map, 46º24’ east. This is where our investigation begins.

The mine shaft glistens below, as if it were a wishing well.

Tiny shimmering particles are stirred up in the wind. They cling like fairy dust to the children.

The mineral they extract is part of the green transition meant to make the world sustainable, yet none of them will have enough to eat tonight.

His voice is high-pitched, his collarbones protrude under his skin. Laha Varivahtse is thirteen years old but looks more like eight.

Now he pulls on the orange headlamp he shares with his siblings – the only equipment they have besides a hammer and a chisel.

Without gloves or a helmet, wearing only a tattered shirt torn by the jagged rock walls, he climbs down into the narrow mine shaft.

“I have to work. Otherwise, we starve to death,” he says.

His bare feet brace against the walls of the hole. He lowers himself down, crawls into the passage, and lets the darkness swallow him.

In recent years, the global hunt for raw materials has intensified. Country after country is being scoured for cobalt, lithium, nickel, manganese, and other minerals necessary for the green transition.

From countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, come urgent warnings about how the extraction of battery minerals leads to forced labour and people displacement. Meanwhile, back home, the EU drafts laws and compiles lists to secure our supply.

But beyond these critical lists is a mineral of the future that few know about.

A shiny rock, with an almost magical ability to insulate electricity.

Mica, as the mineral is known, is made up of thin aluminium silicates that can be split into sheets. It has long been used in everything from car paint to glossy makeup. It is also found in many everyday items like toasters, coffee makers, and microwaves. 

But it’s the electric car boom that has seen demand for mica insulation explode, driving billions in sales every year.

Each vehicle uses about 10 kilograms. The mica surrounds the battery and prevents it from catching fire.

It is there as a protective shield.

We follow Laha down. The temperature rises while the oxygen level drops. 

After just a few metres, it becomes harder to breathe.

“Sometimes we faint at the bottom,” says Laha.

The rock scrapes against our arms. The dust is everywhere.

As an adult, it is impossible to go deeper. But Laha’s small body can continue. He follows the bluish glow of his headlamp toward the extraction point: about ten metres down into the bedrock and twenty metres sideways.

He has been working here for three years. But Laha remembers another life. How it was before the disaster. 

We count about fifty workers, of which about thirty are children. 

That’s not counting the youngest, the four- and five-year-olds who walk around on the ground looking for pebbles. They all come from the neighbouring village of Bevia.

Strangers are rarely allowed into the mines. But we’ve made contact with a man with family ties here who has organised a special invitation.

The grown men of the village held a ceremony under the big tamarind tree and emptied a small bottle of liquor over the trunk.

They have offered a few welcoming words and expressed hope that our visit might help break the hard times.

Now, we are accepted and free to move around.

The older children chip away at the mica, embedded in the bedrock by the harder stone, calcite.

Malala Vahos, 11, and her older sister Zotontsoaés, 14, have an equally gruelling task. They must descend to the mine’s deepest point, gather the stones, and haul them back up to the surface.

Malala presses a hand to her neck.

“You have to crawl in such an awkward position. Your whole body tenses up, and your back hurts so much,” she says. 

Maybe this is a lucky day after all.

On the way here this morning, she shot a small kibo bird with her slingshot. She holds her fingers tightly around its beak.

The bird rests in her hand without trying to fly away. In a few hours, it will be the family’s lunch.

But for now, Malala must go back down into the mine. She hands the kibo to Sahiratsoaré, 7, who, along with Lydiane, 6, is busy sorting mica stones on the ground, and gives her bravest smile:

“Keep an eye on it now!”

Laha Varivahtse emerges again. Out of breath, with a layer of dust covering his sweaty skin.

He takes a few sips of water and looks out over the mining area, a collection of pits along the slope without any form of fencing.

His eyes are dull and vacant. His empty stomach is taking its toll. All he has eaten in the past day is boiled cassava leaves and cactus fruit.

Laha sinks to the ground, points to his mouth, and says kere.

Hunger. Starvation.

It is the most common word here.

We ask the village elder, Friagna Maka, 60, when they last had enough to eat.

“Six years ago, before kere.” 

Laha and the other children do not know that the mineral they mine is used in electric cars. They have barely seen a fossil-fuel-powered vehicle, apart from the buyer’s truck and the occasional UN jeep.

Laha’s thoughts go to the change that caused the famine.

His fingers snap a small piece of mica.

“If only we had enough food like before, we would have the strength to dig more…”

Six years ago, the rains stopped falling in southern Madagascar. It became dry. Completely dry.

The baobab trees withered. The fields turned into unusable sand. The zebu cattle died of thirst.

The people in Laha’s village survived on cactus fruit. In the end, when things were at their worst, they ate the thorny leaves too.

By the summer of 2021, more than a million people were without food.

Other famines in modern times have been triggered by wars and conflicts. This was the first one where global warming was the main cause, according to the UN.

The tourists we met on the domestic flight from the capital were, like most other visitors, unaware of what had happened, that the green island had turned yellow and brown.

That the holiday paradise had, from one high season to the next, become something else.

The site of the world’s first climate-induced famine.

Laha’s father hands over a cactus fruit. It is bright red like a pomegranate but sour and full of seeds.

The juice stains their mouths, making the children laugh for a moment, but soon the excitement fades.

Tear-filled eyes lock onto us.

Why have we really come here, to their remote village?

Before kere, the villagers lived off the land. They grew beans and corn, sweet potatoes and watermelon. They harvested enough to feed everyone and still had leftovers to take cartloads with their zebu cattle to the market in Amboasary, seventeen kilometres away.

In the second year without rain, a man came to the village and said:

“There is money in the mountain.”

The elders in the village knew that there had once been a mine here during French rule in the 1950s.

On-site, they found abandoned tools, hammers, and chisels. With empty stomachs, they started mining.

Dull hammering sounds rise from the mines.

The sun burns, the mica glistens like shattered glass.

The capital is a three-day bumpy bus ride away. Laha’s village may seem isolated, but nothing happens in a vacuum.

The rich world bears the main responsibility for the drought here, through its emissions. And the same rich world now drives people underground, in the hunt for minerals.

Over the past ten years, mica sales from Madagascar have increased fivefold.

Low prices have meant that for certain types, Madagascar has even surpassed the former largest exporter, India. Almost all of it ends up in China.

In 2023, for the first time, an electric car—Tesla Model Y—was the best-selling car model in the world. Yet this is only the beginning; in the coming years, sales will multiply.

We look into the policy documents of electric car manufacturers. Some list mica as a risk mineral, alongside other critical raw materials. None mention a word about where it comes from.

Small lizards scurry by. Laha swats away a fly. The wounds on his hands sting, but there is no soothing ointment.

He dreams of owning a house and many zebu cattle when he grows up. Malala wants to become a nurse.

They say it as if they were wishing for a charter trip to the moon. Neither of them goes to school.

We bend down, pick up a piece.

Feel the layers. The greasy, shiny surface acts as a mirror.

We are thrown back to the luxurious car showrooms, where the new models cost hundreds of thousands of kronor.

Could the mica piece in our hand end up in one of them?

The villagers get about one krona per kilo. For that price, the stone must be broken from the bedrock with sheer muscle power, hauled up from the hole, sorted, and carried to the collection point more than a kilometre away.

After a day’s labour, a team of four or five children and adults has earned about twenty kronor together. It is not enough for anyone to have a full stomach. 

The village elder, Friagna, lights a hand-rolled cigarette and coughs out some dust.

“The buyer comes here once a month, loads up the stone, and pays. He never asks any questions.”

We note the name of the local company the buyer works for. We suspect that this detail will be important for the tracking that lies ahead.

Radoran.

There are no reliable figures on how many minors die or get injured in Madagascar’s mica mines.

The operations are unregulated. No one has employed the children. No one covers hospital or funeral bills if the mountain collapses.

We ask Laha if he is afraid. He laughs dismissively, just as he has seen his older brother Mosa, 19, do.

“No… But sometimes we get falling stones in our faces and eyes. That’s scary.”

The land belongs to the state. Like many others in the country, the mine has no permit.

That might seem irrelevant—neither the police nor other authorities are anywhere to be seen here. For a starving person, hunger is all that matters.

But it means that prices are kept low and the region misses out on tax revenues that could have been used to build schools and hospitals. Illegally mined mica leaves Madagascar to end up in new, expensive electric cars.

The road to the West goes through China. And the next link in our chain is Radoran’s customers there.

We search through a dozen different online databases that provide customs data and shipping records, using the trade code for mica, 2525.

But we find nothing. China keeps the information secret, and only occasional shipments to other countries are visible.

It is just past eleven in the morning. Laha and the other children have been working for four hours. The silence between the hammer blows grows longer. They are exhausted.

They need to find something to eat.

They set out to look for cactus fruit.

A UNICEF report from last year estimated that at least 11,000 children between the ages of 5 and 17 are exploited in mica mining in southern Madagascar. Many more are at risk of being exploited.

There are no more organised, industrial facilities.

Small village mines are not the exception. They are not even the rule.

They are all that exists. An archipelago of points of no return.

Cyclones rarely used to pass through this part of Madagascar. But climate change has disrupted the patterns, and this past spring, there were two.

The rain poured down. The people in the villages tried to dig trenches, but most of the water rushed away and evaporated.

The famine is less acute now. But still, two million people are in need of emergency aid.

The sun beats down from the sky. The rain clouds, which should be gathering at this time of year, are nowhere to be seen.

We continue searching for Radoran’s customers. We contact exporters, aid organisations, and industry experts. We enlist the help of the Dutch organisation Somo, which gives researchers and journalists access to typically closed records.

But the links in the mica supply chain remain out of reach.

We travel under vast skies. Across expanses of cactus thickets, through forests with peculiar trees found only here.

At times, it feels like traveling into a painting.

Over the years, cobalt and other minerals needed for the green transition have been linked to exploitation, as Aftonbladet has previously reported.

But in many cases, efforts to prevent the worst abuses have made progress. For mica, however, there is still no certification or effective traceability.

“No company that buys mica from Madagascar can guarantee that it wasn’t mined by children. They don’t even know which mine it comes from. Traceability is zero,” says Valéry Ramaherison, a mining expert at Transparency International.

Our thoughts return to the electric car manufacturers. In their policy documents, each of them claims to have zero tolerance for child labour.

How does it all add up?

A sharp crack echoes as the side mirror smacks into a cactus. Our guide signals to slow down. The next mine awaits.

A short climb takes us to the next site. The smell of smoke is in the air—cactus is being burned to feed the zebu cattle.

The stone crumbles, flaking like delicate croissants. The ground shimmers like foil.

About forty workers are busy mining, nearly half of them children.

There is the same lack of tools and protective equipment here. The same desperate hunger.

A boy, around eight years old, with stick-thin arms and a swollen belly, strikes two stones together, trying to release the mica.

He keeps hitting and hitting, but his strength is not enough to break the rock.

Nomea Maro, 16, sits on the ground sorting stones. Her right hand shakes a cut-up plastic bucket, used as a sieve. Her left hand holds her eight-month-old daughter, Francine.

After giving birth, Nomea kept going down into the mine, with her daughter strapped to her back. But Francine cried inconsolably, and eventually, she gave up. Now, she is forced to collect small stones above ground.

Nomea’s lips are cracked, her hands peeling from the labour.

“The worst part is the sand that gets stirred up. Francine gets it in her eyes.”

In recent weeks, she has tried feeding her daughter boiled cassava leaves and cactus fruit because she herself has eaten too little to breastfeed. Now, the baby has developed diarrhoea and started vomiting.

Nomea’s face tightens, the wrinkle between her eyes deepens.

“She needs to go to the hospital. But how?”

The sun rises higher in the sky. It was thirty-two degrees in the car. Now maybe thirty-five, far hotter than usual for this time of year.

The starving boy keeps striking and striking, but the stone remains unbroken.

We step into the shade. The adults talk about the zebu gangs that roam the area. About the increasing plundering in the wake of climate stress.

Francine grabs her mother’s cheek and babbles, momentarily easing the worry.

Madagascar should be a rich country. It has sought-after raw materials and a biodiversity unmatched anywhere else on Earth.

But a small elite rules from the capital, with neither the will nor the ability to break the spiral of poverty. Erosion and overpopulation exacerbate the problems.

There is no refining or processing in the country. The mica disappears—along with the profits.

We look out over the landscape, toward the jagged silhouette of the mountains.

The canvas is torn apart.

This is no idyll but its opposite—the site of abuse.

Article 32 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that children must be protected from exploitation and from work that is harmful, dangerous, or prevents them from going to school.

The words are written in black and white. Almost every country has signed. Car companies refer to the convention in their sustainability efforts.

Yet, the demand remains. The world keeps buying.

The children follow us in clusters back toward the village, their eyes fixed on us—foreigners—as if there is something we must grasp, something we have yet to understand.

The inbox chimes. What we have been searching for has arrived: an Excel sheet detailing mica exports from Madagascar to China.

In total, there are 576 documented shipments between 1 November 2022 and 30 April 2023 to scroll through.

Radoran, which buys from the child labour mine we visited, accounts for more shipments than any other exporter.

We list the exporter’s biggest customers:

  • Pamica, 36 shipments with a total of 20,040 bags and 1,085 tonnes
  • Ningbo Ram Electric Material, 53 shipments with a total of 29,678 bags and 1,603 tonnes
  • Pinjiang VPI, 32 deliveries with a total of 17,844 bags and 968 tonnes

Based on previous reports, we suspect that at least the first company sells directly to end customers in the West. The other two seem to have their own production but also act as middlemen for other Chinese factories.

The walls of the restaurant in Amboassary are covered with posters of overweight white children and an abundance of fruit and food.

Happy childhood, it says.

Aid workers take a break from the nightmare with grilled zebu meat and beer.

The music plays until the power goes out and the full moon becomes the only light.

The only vehicle we encounter on the way to the epicentre of the climate famine is a water tanker. It’s stuck.

People are crowding to drink directly from the leaking stream.

The protective trees have been cut down. The wind sweeps in, carrying sand that blankets the fields, making human life impossible.

There are plans to build a huge water pipeline from a river further north, where the water still flows. Madagascar contributes no more than 0.01% of global carbon dioxide emissions. At several climate summits, rich polluting nations have pledged to fund emergency measures like this.

But the money for the hardest-hit countries is withheld. And the fields of Madagascar remain dry.

The jeep struggles forward, kilometre after kilometre, past barren fields.

The sand gets in through the windows. It sticks in your mouth, grinding between your teeth.

On a patch of gravel no bigger than a football pitch in the community of Ambovombe, we find the people who have lost everything.

When the drought struck, they were forced to sell their animals to buy food. Then the land.

Now they live in tents made of rice sacks and cactus trees, ten in each.

The children gather in clusters. Their noses are running. Everyone has diarrhoea. There is no school for the climate refugees. No medicines. No emergency aid. It is as if we have stepped into a different era.

Sometimes children collapse in an instant, in the middle of play. Or waste away and disappear, quietly, in their sleep.

Her face is covered with the ground bark of the tamarind tree. One morning two weeks ago, Soavinale Same’s six-month-old son lay motionless inside the tent. She shook the little body, but the boy couldn’t wake up.

“God called him back,” says the mother.

She scratches herself, so that some of the mourning mask flakes off.

There is nothing left of the boy. No clothes, no toys. Not even a picture in someone’s phone.

But he was there. The boy who was born, lived, and died as a result of other people’s emissions had a name. Mahatante.

A small shop sells water for 18 kronor a bottle, the price of ultimate luxury, money no one here has.

The dust is swirling.

The red wind is whipping up, already tearing at the tents.

The Mandrare River used to be several hundred metres wide in its last few miles towards the sea.

Now the bridge has lost its purpose.

Over the growing sandbanks, wells are being dug. People walk two, three miles to fetch drinking water.

Children fill yellow twenty-litre jugs and wobble away on bicycles—two in the back, one in front. High above them, birds of prey circle. 

The cycle has been broken. The fields dry up again without water, and the land can no longer feed its people.

Is this an anomaly—or the beginning of something greater, more irreversible?

The sun sinks, vast and orange, more beautiful than anywhere else.

We can’t linger. The trail lies right before us. 

Radoran’s procurement centre is located on the outskirts of Amboassary.

In front of a hangar-like warehouse, three trucks are parked, each with 15 tonnes of hand-mined mica.

A fourth truck rolls in shortly after we arrive. It comes from the famine-stricken villages north of Ambovombe.

A few guys shovel the mica off the truck bed. It rattles, like the sound of falling shells.

The site manager, Maurice Alexandre, 29, is the first person we meet in the mica supply chain who isn’t malnourished.

Unlike the miners, he has a fixed monthly salary of two thousand kronor, a dream here.

“Last year, we were still affected by the pandemic. The Chinese ordered less. But now it’s picking up again quickly,” he says.

The site manager explains that he is aware of child labour.

“What can we do? We don’t have our own mines and can’t control those of others. The important thing is that the stone is thin and hard, like the Chinese want it.”

The buyer, Jean Marie Brindavoine, 35, complains that the villagers are lazy.

“As soon as the UN comes and hands out food, they stop working. Everything halts.”

The site manager nods.

“But now there’s a drought, and they can’t farm. And that’s good for production,” he says.

Flies crawl on the concrete walls.

We think of Laha and the other children. The hunger and the toil, the exploitation that looks a lot like slavery. 

No data on trade between Chinese companies is available, so we decide to contact the companies directly. Instead of identifying ourselves as journalists, we pretend to represent a newly established Swedish battery company looking for mica insulation.

Soon, we get confirmation that both Ningbo Ram and Pinjiang VPI sell unprocessed mica to one of China’s largest manufacturers of battery insulation. This adds a fourth name to our list.

Glory Mica.

Another flatbed rattles.

The next shipment is being prepared. 348 tonnes are already waiting in 964 white sacks in the warehouse. The ship to China will depart soon.

On the last day, the clouds actually start to gather. Rain falls like a mirage.

Our thoughts turn to the resilience of the people. Their pride, their strength, their laughter.

They plant, watch it wither. They plant again.

The container terminal outside the old slave port Tolagnaro is the final stop; a hypermodern facility, built, owned, and operated by the British-Australian mining company Rio Tinto.

Ships unload food aid and load minerals.

Port manager Mary Toerasoa takes us on a bus tour, while guards from the security company G4S check that we don’t take any photos. The truth is, there’s nothing to photograph; the port is an island of modernity and could be anywhere on Earth.

Our gaze turns to the sea. The waves crash in.

Nothing happens in a vacuum, everything is connected.

We examine the list of Chinese companies, cross out the intermediaries, and focus the spotlight on the big companies that buy mica mined by children—Pamica and Glory Mica. The chain does not end here. Two emails are sent. 

Who do you sell to?

We head home, but the answers won’t take long. There’s a sequel—a link to some of the best-known electric car brands in the world.

How the mica is traced to electric car giants

https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/jlWAOA/sa-kopplas-tesla-till-barngruvorna-vi-foljer-sparet

51 documented deliveries.

Now, Aftonbladet can reveal the connection between electric car giant Tesla and two major Chinese suppliers who purchase child-mined mica.

Volvo Cars and BMW also do business with one of the companies.

In an investigative report, Aftonbladet has detailed how children mine mica in southern Madagascar.

“I have to work. Otherwise, we starve to death,” says Laha Varivahtse, 13.  

The mineral has long been used in everything from makeup to car paint. However, it’s the ability to insulate electric car batteries that has caused demand to rise rapidly worldwide. From Madagascar, the export of mica has quintupled in the last decade. Today, 11,000 children are estimated to be exploited in the mines, making up half the workforce.

On site, Aftonbladet has been able to document how child-mined mica is sold to the local exporter Radoran. Using export data, we have traced the mineral to two major Chinese mica product manufacturers: Pamica and Glory Mica.

Both companies list several well-known car manufacturers as “partners” on their websites. But these business relationships need to be verified.

For several weeks, we investigated the flows of mica from the companies.

***

China keeps virtually all export and customs data secret. Even within the EU, it is not usually available. But by taking advantage of the transparency of the US, we can map trade to the US market.

With the help of the Dutch organisation Somo, which gives journalists and researchers access to export data, and databases such as Panjiva, we track shipments of mica products from Pamica to the US from 1 October 2022, onward.

Several smaller US electronics companies turn out to be on the customer list. And so is the world’s leading and most famous electric car manufacturer—Tesla.

The company, led by Elon Musk, currently produces over a million cars per year.

In total, we have identified at least eight shipments of mica trays from Pamica to Tesla’s US factories, with a total weight of 68 tonnes.

***

The other Chinese company buying child-mined mica—Glory Mica—is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of battery insulation. And once again, Tesla is a major customer. 

Since 1 October 2022, we can identify 43 deliveries of different types of mica insulation from Glory Mica to Tesla, with a total weight of several hundred tonnes.

***

But Elon Musk’s pioneering company is not the only electric car brand on the customer list.

Swedish Volvo Cars also appears in the data.

During the same period, Aftonbladet can map 11 deliveries of mica sheets from Glory Mica to Volvo Cars’ American factory in Charleston, South Carolina.

Later, it will also be confirmed that a third well-known car brand, which is currently switching to electric power, is buying from the Chinese company – German BMW.

***

We contact Pamica and Glory Mica. Instead of stating that we are journalists, we pretend to represent a newly started Swedish battery company looking for mica insulation.

Pamica does not respond, and shortly after our first email is sent, the English-language website is taken down.

The response from Glory Mica’s programme manager arrives a couple of days later. With some pride, he explains that the company is a major supplier to Volvo Cars’ factories worldwide, and that two years ago, Volvo gave Glory Mica the “Best Supplier” award and last year a “Quality Excellence Award.”

He admits that Glory Mica sources a significant portion of its mica from Madagascar.

“But that doesn’t mean we have ignored possible challenges there,” he writes.

The website links to three different policy documents aimed at ensuring that the company purchases minerals responsibly. How these policies are enforced or what the checks are is not specified.

In a later email, the programme manager admits that child-mined mica cannot currently be separated out:

“There is no established traceability.” 

Both Tesla and BMW state in clear policy documents that they have zero tolerance for child labour. Minerals mined by minors should simply not exist in their cars.

Volvo Cars also rules out business relationships with companies linked to child labour.

“We are not involved in child labour or forced labour, and we do not knowingly cooperate with anyone involved in child labour, forced labour or other unfair and illegal practices,” writes Volvo in its Code of Conduct.

***

Kristina Ullrich works in corporate responsibility at the children’s rights organisation TDH, which seeks to end abuse in the mica mines of Madagascar and India. She urges electric car brands to speak out, rather than hiding behind policy texts.

“Considering how much mica comes from Madagascar and how many car parts it is used in, I can’t imagine any manufacturer claiming to be free of child labour.”

A typical electric car contains about ten kilograms of mica, according to Ullrich. Companies like Tesla need to realise that they are dependent on a mineral that is often mined by children in hazardous conditions. And that the situation is dire.

“No one can do it all. But if every carmaker committed to ten villages, ensuring that adults earned a living wage and children went to school, the difference would be huge. Every day that a child is forced into a mine causes harm.”  

***

Aftonbladet pressured Tesla’s press contacts in the US, Europe and Sweden for several days. The electric car giant returned an email with links to three different policy documents.

Not a single word about mica. And Aftonbladet’s questions are left without answers.

***

In a statement to Aftonbladet, BMW writes:

“We can confirm that Glory Mica is part of our supplier network. According to our purchasing terms, they are required to comply with legal requirements and extensive environmental and social standards, and they must also pass these on to their subcontractors. This also includes a clear ban on child labour.”

***

Despite repeated requests, Volvo Cars declined to give an interview. In a written response, press officer Magnus Holst states that information about potential violations is taken very seriously.

The car manufacturer states that the mica sold by Glory Mica to Volvo does not come from Madagascar, but will not say where it is sourced from instead. 

“For competition reasons, we do not share an exact list of countries of origin. However, we can say that the mica components supplied by Glory Mica are part of our traceability programme, which uses blockchain technology (a digital method of storing and sharing information about the origin of minerals, for example) to track the material throughout the supply chain. This solution helps us ensure the origin of the material, which in this case is not Madagascar.”

The question of how the partnership with Glory Mica aligns with the commitment in Volvo’s Code of Conduct—not to cooperate with companies linked to child labour—is left unanswered.

Shortly after we started contacting the car companies, Glory Mica’s website also went down. However, we will soon have reasons to return to both the Chinese company and Volvo Cars.

Footnote: Aftonbladet has reached out to Pamica and Glory Mica for a comment. The export data is incomplete and may contain inaccuracies.