There were 7.8 million EVs sold in 2022, according to The Wall Street Journal. The number of EVs are increasing exponentially as most high-polluting economies have made them integral to decarbonising emissions-heavy transport sectors. The rare, silvery metal is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery, a necessary part of the booming electric vehicle (EV) industry. “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,” Mr Kara writes in the book.Ī young boy carries a sack at a small-scale cobalt mining site in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Siddharth Kara)Īround 75 per cent of the world’s cobalt is mined in the DRC - and the world cannot get enough of it. If you own a smartphone, tablet, laptop, e-scooter, electric vehicle (or all of the above), then it is a system in which you are unwittingly complicit. The miners are the first step in the race for precious metals and minerals by some of the world’s most powerful companies, with multibillion-dollar valuations and whose founders and CEOs are household names. The “quaint” moniker of artisanal mining, Mr Kara points out, belies a brutal industry where hundreds of thousands of men, women and children dig with bare hands and basic tools in toxic, perilous pits, eking out an existence on the bottom rung of the global supply chain. It is just one of many devastating personal accounts in Cobalt Red, a detailed exposé into the hidden world of small-scale cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
“I thank God for taking my babies,” she said. Priscille told him she had suffered two miscarriages and that her husband, a fellow “artisanal” miner, died of a respiratory disease. We’re not against it,” commented Amnesty researcher Mark Dummett.The artisanal mining industry in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is rife with forced and child labor, unreported deaths and human rights abuses, writes academic and modern slavery researcher Siddharth Kara in his new book Cobalt Red (Siddharth Kara)ĭuring one of his many visits to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Siddharth Kara, an author and Harvard academic who has spent 20 years researching modern slavery, met a young woman sifting dirt for traces of cobalt. Other observers, including Sheila Warren, head of blockchain policy at the World Economic Forum, said the prevalence of conflict, lawlessness, and an opaque legal system in the DRC were outstanding challenges to blockchain succeeding. “The technology is not the hard part,” she said.Īmnesty International, which documented the extent of child labor in the DRC’s cobalt industry in 2016 says technology like blockchain is not a silver bullet to solving this problem. “You have to be wary of technological solutions to problems that are also political and economic, but blockchain may help. Accordingly, they have formed the Responsible Cobalt Initiative - joined by Apple and Samsung - to address child labor.
#Cobalt ore mining child labor free#
One potential risk in the supply chain is that cobalt mined by children gets mixed with “clean” cobalt before processing.īusinesses in China, the main destination for Congolese cobalt, realize that companies are under increasing pressure to show consumers that their supply chains are free from human rights abuses. The pilot will involve organisations throughout the supply chain, from on-the-ground monitors checking that sites are not using child labour, through the refining process to end users, according to people helping to develop the scheme. The plan for the Congo pilot scheme is to give each sealed bag of cobalt produced by a vetted artisanal miner a digital tag which is entered on blockchain using a mobile phone, along with details of the weight, date, time and perhaps a photo.Īt the next stage, a trader buying the bag would record the details on blockchain, and the process would be repeated until the ore gets to the smelter – leaving an immutable record of the cobalt’s journey for downstream buyers or third parties to view.
Reuters reports that blockchain is not new to the mining industry: The pilot project to be launched this year aims to eventually give manufacturers assurance that the cobalt they source was not mined with child labor. Cobalt is used in lithium-ion batteries, but the cobalt mining industry has had a long-standing problem of using child labor, subjecting children to working in dangerous mines. Blockchain technology will now be used to track cobalt mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo as it makes its way into smartphones and electric cars.
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