Until recently, when using my laptop or driving in my dad’s electric vehicle (EV), I never thought about human trafficking or people being buried alive in makeshift tunnels. I certainly never thought about cobalt, the critical mineral in rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. However, after extensive research into this overlooked issue I can’t help but think about the egregious human and environmental degradation that I’ve unknowingly been complicit in. My hope is that after reading this, you too will be moved to take action like I have.
Most of the world’s cobalt is located in The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Unlike other minerals that require significant digging to access, cobalt exists at the surface making it so that anyone, including children, need nothing but their own hands to mine it. According to Cobalt Red author and leading expert on the DRC’s cobalt mining, Siddarth Kara, “There’s this mad scramble on the ground that’s devoid of any moral boundaries or sustainability considerations to feed cobalt up the chain into the gadgets and cars.”
EVs in particular require massive amounts of cobalt. Their owners usually drive them for environmental reasons, but most have no idea that they’re contributing to unimaginable environmental and human suffering as a result. In fact, the number of EVs has only increased and the trend will continue as EVs play a major role in the clean energy movement. As users of electric toothbrushes, EVs, etc., we must take action to ameliorate the exploitative conditions surrounding cobalt mining. But first, we must understand what artisanal mining is and how companies like Tesla, Apple, Samsung, and Ford, are able to maintain plausible deniability under the current system.
Most people think of industrial mining, large scale operations using machinery, when they think of mining at all. Artisanal cobalt mining, a name given by mining companies designed to obscure the truth, refers to subsistence miners using their hands or a small shovel to mine in extremely dangerous conditions. For instance, artisanal miners will dig tunnels following a vein of cobalt as deep as 150 feet with no ventilation or supports. The air contains cobalt particles that are toxic to breathe in or touch. When the tunnels collapse, which they frequently do, those inside are buried alive or have their limbs crushed, leading to amputation. These mining areas have also seen an astounding rise in birth defects, developmental delays in children, miscarriages, and reproductive health issues in women.
Women and girls, in particular, are also victims of rampant physical and sexual assault. Mine guards armed with Kalashnikovs or machetes are part of militia groups who abduct and traffic children and force them to mine or into prostitution all the while lining their own pockets. Boys are not immune from this sexual exploitation, but Kara points out that “women and girls are so vulnerable and so heavily exploited. And you surround them with young men, militias, army guys, mining police, and they're just preyed upon from every direction.”
Adding to horrific human exploitation, the resulting environmental degradation has made it so whole lakes and rivers are disappearing in the area. Millions of trees have been clear cut and entire villages bulldozed. Lakes and rivers that remain are so full of industrial pollution, fish can no longer survive in them and crops can no can no longer grow along the river banks. People living here can no longer rely on crops or fish for sustenance and find that they have no other means to survive except mine for cobalt, where the dollar earned for that day provides hope for a meal.
While the cobalt supply chain is certainly not the only one that’s tainted with human and environmental exploitation, there’s something deeply unsettling about the cobalt supply chain. Perhaps it’s because the greatest demand for cobalt is for clean energy, and yet it is coming at an enormous environmental cost . So what are we to do? As consumers of everything from ipads to MRI’s, we must demand that CEO’s of the companies that source cobalt for their products stop producing marketing material suggesting that their cobalt is clean.The truth is that The DRC’S industrial and artisanal mined cobalt both end up in the same exact supply chains. We must demand that they themselves visit the ground operation to see what vast amounts of reporting has already exposed.
We can want two things at once: our tablets and EV’s, but also that Big Tech and EV manufacturers produce changes at the very bottom of their supply chains. Kara warns that, “At no point in human history has so much suffering generated so much profit and been directly linked to the lives of billions of people around the world.” If you want the conveniences that come with rechargeable batteries like I do, but aren’t willing to participate in the human and environmental harm it's causing, I hope you’ll be moved as I’ve been to take action.