Cobalt

Cobalt is a mineral extracted from heterogenite, a sub-product of copper extracted from deep Earth mining. The metal is refined and used in every lithium-ion battery in the world to prevent overheating. In other terms- every phone, electric vehicle, and rechargeable device in the world requires cobalt for its batteries, and of all the world’s cobalt, The Democratic Republic of the Congo is home to 74%. While this should be mined industrially, there has been a mass uptake in small-scale artesanal mining, where people venture deep into hand-dug tunnels and hack at them with pickaxes, hammers, and pieces of rebar in a desperate effort to sell sacks to refineries in exchange for one or two dollars a day.

The cobalt supply chain is incredibly fragmented and international, which is why a sense of accountability becomes difficult to conceive or enforce here. Artisenally-mined cobalt moves from “the pit”, or deeply-entrenched tunnels and is then cleaned and placed into large rafia sacks, sold to negocion, or intermediaries which then transport the metal to refineries (smelters) in nearby cities, which are largely Chinese- and Indian-owned, and become mixed in with industrially-mined cobalt. This supply is then transported to battery component makers and battery manufacturing plants, namely in China, where over-half are centred and structured into lithium-ion batteries. These batteries are off-sold to tech giants and, frankly any company that uses batteries and become displayed and consumed from showcase rooms that harbour phones, tablets, EVs, and everything else we use in our modern world.

There is no other industry with a larger power disparity and mechanism of exploitation than the dynamic between sellers, being conglomerate tech corporations with revenues in the billions of dollars, and local Congolese artesanal miners, devoid of any other choice or means of survival who scrounge the Earth for this precious metal. This dynamic perpetuates a system of violent extraction- one where homes are bulldozed without compensation to make room for new mines, and sulphuric acid rains from the sky in yellow ashes as the air fills with pollutants. One where children are trafficked without remorse and people, earnest human people are reduced to the worth of few dollars and discarded with the ease of a collapsed tunnel, or the helplessness of hunger. There is no just comparison of power when we look at two players: one, without access to an education, any other job, and fraught with the most basic need to survive and ensure. The other: a distanced company unaware and un-empathetic to these struggles, attuned only to the needs of maximizing shareholder value, in other words, reducing the burdenous costs of labour and production. Power balances cannot be deciphered, or even conceptualized when the two are utterly incompatible or existent in the same space.

Here, the misfortune lies in the idea that changes to the system are inextricably dependent on a recognition of the system. As it stands, a lack of accountability exists because of public claims that these companies are uninvolved and unassociated from non-industrial mining and it’s reparations. Thus a solution, which must come from the same corporations which claim they are uninvolved would deteriorate the blatant lies about a scenario inside a country that very few people may actually go to. Solutions to these problems are straightforward, feasible, and low-cost: creating basic support. Supplying PPE for miners, investing in ventilation and stabilizers for tunnels, offering alternative housing for victims of displacement, public infrastructure and education offerings. At a higher level, this begins with a strengthened corporate accountability and social responsibility regime that requires an obstruct re-investigation of international law and global supply chain scapegoating.

Gross, T. (2023, February 1). How “modern-day slavery” in the Congo powers the rechargeable battery economy. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893248/red-cobalt-congo-drc-mining-siddharth-kara

Kara, S. (2024). Cobalt red. Macmillan US.

Tesla. (2018, December 31). Tesla Conflict Minerals Report. https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/about/legal/2018-conflict-minerals-report.pdf

Schoonover, N. (2025, March 28). China in Africa: March 2025. Council on Foreign Relations. https://www.cfr.org/article/china-africa-march-2025#:~:text=Of%20the%20ten%20largest%20cobalt,percent%20of%20its%20refined%20cobalt