It all just wafts over the mining provinces. They’re supposed to contain the effluence, the gas clouds, as they would in their own home countries, these foreign mining companies, but no one cares about the people of the Congo or the environment of the Congo. When the industrial mines process the ore, they use sulfuric acid. There are tens of thousands of children who are working usually alongside their parents, but many are orphans as well.Īnd the ore sometimes has traces of radioactive uranium in it, which has very bleak consequences to the human body. Then as children get older, especially teenage boys, they’ll be involved in tunnel digging, which requires more strength. When there’s a sack of dirt and stone that’s been gathered, you have to separate the dirt and the valueless stones from the cobalt-bearing stones, so they sieve what they’ve gathered in putrid toxic pools of sludgy water or in nearby little ponds and lakes. The youngest ones will do surface digging, just scraping at the surface to gather what they can, and young boys and, more so, girls will do rinsing and sieving. Kara: We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people involved in this artisanal economy, including tens of thousands of children as young as five and six years old. It just flows almost seamlessly into the formal supply chain.Į360: A lot of these workers are children. One of the great fictions promulgated outside of the Congo is there are these immutable lines between industrial and artisanal production, and when you get on the ground you realize that it’s an utter fiction, that there’s no line, there’s no wall. Then it’s in the formal supply chain, and there’s no disaggregating it from what was dug through industrial means because it’s all dumped together to be processed. There’s this laundering mechanism of traders and buying houses and depots that pay a few dollars a sack to the artisanal miners and then turn right back around and sell those sacks straight to industrial mining companies or processing facilities. Everything that artisanal miners dig out of the ground is sold through intermediaries who then sell it to formal mining companies. Kara: A shadow economy exists underneath the formal economy. Subscribe to the E360 Newsletter for weekly updates delivered to your inbox. And that’s called artisanal mining, meaning people with their hands as opposed to heavy equipment. In fact, it’s grindingly poor people scraping and scrounging in pits and trenches with pickaxes, shovels, their bare hands, strips of rebar, in tattered rags as they gather up cobalt-bearing ore, stones, and pebbles into sacks. It makes you think of craftsmen or people baking bread or something. Kara: The term is just nonsensical in its inaccuracy. So I redirected all my efforts toward trying to research what was happening and raise awareness.Į360: You talk about “industrial” mines and “artisanal” mines.
I made a first trip in 2018, and I was expecting to see some pretty miserable conditions, but the scale of it, the severity of what was happening, the enormity of the violence against the people and environment there - it really shocked me. I had no idea at that time about this metal and how it related to rechargeable batteries. Siddharth Kara: I started hearing from colleagues in the field around 2016 that there were issues with how cobalt was being mined in the Congo. Yale Environment 360: How did you come to focus on this topic? “Environmental destruction, human destruction, labor exploitation, public-health catastrophe,” he says. Chan School of Public Health and the author of three previous books on modern-day slavery and sex trafficking, Kara documents how the Congolese government, Chinese tech companies, and every one of us have become unwitting participants in what can only be characterized as a humanitarian crime. Kara provides firsthand testimony from dozens of Congolese caught up in the race to harvest cobalt - a frenzy that has resulted not just in illness and untold deaths, but in the wholesale contamination of the region’s water, soil, and air.Ī fellow at Harvard’s T.H. To report his latest book, Cobalt Red, Kara traveled into militia-controlled mining areas of that troubled nation, where five-year-old children wielding crude shovels and scraps of rebar represent the bottom of a global supply chain that ends on the factory floors of some of the world’s richest and most powerful companies. But as author and contemporary-slavery expert Siddharth Kara says in an interview with Yale Environment 360, those rechargeable batteries require cobalt to function, and 75 percent of the world’s supply of that mineral is mined from the rich earth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As countries around the world look to pivot quickly to clean energy, demand for the lithium-ion batteries used to charge our smartphones, laptops, and electric vehicles is booming.
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