By 2050, the bulk of the world's population growth will take place in Africa: of the additional 2.4 billion people projected between 2015 and 2050, 1.3 billion will be added in Africa, 0.9 billion in Asia and only 0.2 billion in the rest of the world.
Even in the legal markets, coltan mining is environmentally dangerous. Developing nations often go through with mining operations because they need the capital these operations bring without thinking of the environmental impacts. Given that mining is an expensive venture to undertake, the returns are relatively low.oltan is mined using techniques developed for gold mining in the 1800s. The work is hard and dangerous, with workers panning for gold in large craters in stream beds, with the average worker producing less than one kilogram of coltan a day.
Coltan (short for columbiteâtantalite and known industrially as tantalite) is a dull black metallic ore from which the elements niobium and tantalum are extracted. The niobium-dominant mineral in coltan is columbite (after niobium's original American name, columbium), and the tantalum-dominant mineral is tantalite.Tantalum from coltan is used to manufacture tantalum capacitors, used in electronic products.here has been a significant drop in the production and sale of coltan and niobium from African mines since the dramatic price spike in 2000, based on dot com speculation and multiple ordering. This is confirmed in part by figures from the United States Geological Survey.