Slavery was abolished in the U.S. in 1865, and is no longer legal anywhere in the world. So it comes as a shock to learn that, worldwide, some 28 million people are currently held in forced labor, including 3.3 million children, according to estimates from the International Labour Organization. Modern slavery in the construction sector made global headlines last year with the widely reported exploitation of migrant workers during the building of Qatar’s World Cup infrastructure. But what’s less well known—and arguably more open to architects’ influence—is that forced labor taints the extraction, manufacture, and transport of some of the construction sector’s most common materials.
“Risky materials are everywhere,” says Nora Rizzo, ethical materials director at Grace Farms Foundation, a multifaceted humanitarian nonprofit whose recently launched Design for Freedom initiative aims to help eliminate forced labor in building-material supply chains. (A summit to accelerate the movement will be held at Grace Farms, in New Canaan, Connecticut, on March 30.) As a result of supply chains that are rife with forced labor and so disaggregated they’re next to impossible to trace, “there’s likely no building in the world that can claim to be forced-labor free,” Rizzo says. Among the products at greatest risk: brick, copper, glass, minerals, polysilicon (in, for example, solar panels), rubber, steel and iron, stone, textiles, and timber. So-called “precursors”—including soda ash and limestone, that are used in chemical reactions to generate other materials, such as glass and cement—also number among the products most at risk.
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