The Week Unwrapped podcast: Portable homes, surrogacy and cobalt mining

Could moveable houses be the answer to coastline erosion? Should commercial surrogacy be legal? And is your phone tainted by child labour?

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(Image credit: SpaceX)

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days.

In this week’s episode, we discuss:

Portable homes

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A senior official has proposed a solution for people wanting to live on the UK’s rapidly eroding coastline: portable homes. Karen Thomas, head of Coastal Partnership East, says it could be a case of “dragging it across the road” away from a cliff edge, or “physically dismantling it and moving it to somewhere else in the community”. Could this be the answer to other property problems across the UK?

Surrogacy

A long-running legal battle over whether the NHS should pay for a woman to have surrogate children in US after failing to spot her cervical cancer was heard in the UK’s Supreme Court this week. So why is commercial surrogacy illegal in Britain - and should it be?

Child labour

A major lawsuit in the US has implicated some of the world’s largest tech firms in a child labour epidemic sweeping cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But as cobalt is a key component in rechargable batteries - and thus the green energy revolution - are these firms wilfully trading off workers’ rights for environmentalism?

You can subscribe to The Week Unwrapped on the Global Player, Apple podcasts, SoundCloud or wherever you get your podcasts. It is produced by Sarah Myles and the music is by Tom Mawby.