The Congo produces 70% of the world’s cobalt, an essential part of the lithium-ion batteries that give electric vehicles the range and durability needed.
Smartphones, computers and electric vehicles may be emblems of the modern world, but, says Siddharth Kara, their rechargeable batteries are frequently powered by cobalt mined by workers laboring in slave-like conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Kara, a fellow at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and at the Kennedy School, has been researching modern-day slavery, human trafficking and child labor for two decades. He says that although the DRC has more cobalt reserves than the rest of the planet combined, there’s no such thing as a “clean” supply chain of cobalt from the country. In his new book, Cobalt Red, Kara writes that much of the DRC’s cobalt is being extracted by so-called “artisanal” miners — freelance workers who do extremely dangerous labor for the equivalent of just a few dollars a day.
“You have to imagine walking around some of these mining areas and dialing back our clock centuries,” Kara says. “People are working in subhuman, grinding, degrading conditions. They use pickaxes, shovels, stretches of rebar to hack and scrounge at the earth in trenches and pits and tunnels to gather cobalt and feed it up the formal supply chain.”
What our media doesn’t report is the fact that the Cobalt mines often collapse and trapped workers are dug out by hand, if they are lucky. Remember this image next time you hear John Kerry say “climate justice.”
Video below:
Technically, under the law, there should not be artisanal mining taking place in any industrial mine. And yet, lo and behold, at most of the industrial mines, there is some artisanal mining taking place. In some cases, predominantly artisanal mining is taking place. And the reason is, it’s a penny-wage way to boost production. I mean, imagine you’re in a part of the world where there are millions of people who barely get a dollar or two a day who are grindingly poor and will accept almost any labor arrangement just to survive. Well, you put them in a tight pit, cram them with 10,000 other people and pay them a couple of dollars, and they’ll produce thousands of tons of cobalt per year for almost no wages. And so that’s not legal, but it’s happening.
On why these conditions are on par with slavery
Imagine an entire population of people who cannot survive without scrounging in hazardous conditions for a dollar or two a day. There is no alternative there. The mines have taken over everything.
Unregulated mines employ thousands of workers, mining cobalt for batteries, so NET ZERO can be ‘achieved’ & we feel good.
But hey it saves the planet, right?
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