From my History 2300 Class.

In the middle of the 19th century matches were invented. The phosphorus used to make the matches was made using guano and bones. The matches were made in factories across Britain, Europe and North America where thousands of children, boys and girls would dip pine into vats of phosphorus potash and and sulfur. Thousands of boys and girls would make around 40 million matches a day around the world. The "lucifer" match as it was called profoundly changed life for everyone as it was a cheap source of light. However, the chemicals used were devastating to the health of the children who would suffer bone loss often lead to lost jaws, they would glow in the dark from the phosphorus and could spontaneously combust.

"John White, the commissioner of an 1863 report to Parliament on child labor, “270 were under 18, "fifty under 10, ten only 8, and "five only 6 years old. With a working day ranging from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night-labour, irregular meal-times, and meals mostly taken in the workrooms themselves, pestilent with phosphorus, Dante would have found the worst horrors in his Inferno surpassed in this industry.”

Karl Marx used the match industry as an example for his theories in Das Kapital "“manufacture of matches, on account of its unhealthiness and unpleasantness, has such a bad reputation that only the most miserable part of the working class, half-starved widows and so forth, deliver up their children to it.”

 A portion of the bones for this industry came from South America.

"From 1857 to 1861, the Plata states of Buenos Aires, Entre Ríos, and Uruguay combined to kill a total of 4.371 million animals, nearly 1 million a year. The total volume of bones imported into the United Kingdom tripled from 20,000 tons in 1851 to over 62,000 in 1860, the product of the skeletons of nearly 1 million animals, one-third of which came from the Río de la Plata."