There are times when we need to step aside from battery science, and the benefits it brings the developed world. A new study reveals the ongoing impact of cobalt mining on the people of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The author of the book is a fellow at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and at Kennedy School. He has been researching modern-day slavery, human trafficking and child labor for a while.
DRC Cobalt Mining by Freelance Workers Continues
We picked up the thread of this on the NPR news site on February 1, 2023. The fellow at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Kennedy School just published a book he titled Cobalt Red. Now ‘code red’ as we know is an alert hospitals use to refer to an emergency.
Author Siddharth Kara born in Knoxville, Tennessee has impeccable credentials. He is also British Academy global professor, associate professor at University of Nottingham, and adjunct lecturer in public policy at Kennedy School of Government. The Prof told NPR ‘there is no such thing as a clean supply of cobalt’ from DRC.
He goes on to say that much DRC rock-face cobalt mining is by freelance artisanal workers without safety gear. The material is toxic to touch and breathe. Yet NPR reports ‘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.’
The Supply Chain is Cross-Contaminated
Nations beyond DRC borders do their best to distinguish between artisanal-mined, and machine-excavated cobalt. However, Siddharth Kara says this is imperfect because ‘almost all industrial mines have artisanal miners working nearby’.
We agree, ‘We shouldn’t be transitioning to the use of electric vehicles at the cost of the people’. And in ‘one of the most downtrodden and impoverished corners of the world’, either. We don’t have an easy answer to this stain on our industry, but we should keep monitoring it.
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