A HEART-WRENCHING STORY BEHIND ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY

We are ever more dependent on the advanced technology that we, in contemporary society, use on a daily basis. Much of it has, in fact, lost the mystique and novelty that it held for us just a decade or so ago. What before were amazing newfangled gadgets have quickly become everyday tools that we use automatically and with little thought as to the marvel that they represent compared to what was available for our daily use just a few decades ago, and the latest advances are happening at a rate many hundreds of times faster than ever before, especially in the fields of communications and transportation.

But powering the technical advance, there remains the primitive truth of the natural elements necessary to create it. While some of us may be mildly concerned about what will happen to all of the hardware of the modern technological age once it becomes obsolete, few of us give a lot of thought to where the elements used in the manufacturing of that hardware come from in the first place. But we should.

Available data indicates that as much as a quarter of the cobalt used in lithium-ion batteries for just about anything electronic, including electric cars, is sourced from what is known as “artisanal mining”, one of the most exploitative practices on earth. Although this type of mining is being used to extract cobalt in a number of countries, recent world attention has been drawn—thanks to investigations launched by Amnesty International, the Washington Post daily, the CNN cable network, and the CBS broadcast network, among others—to the Democratic Republic of Congo, from where a significant proportion of the cobalt mined in this way comes.

Conditions in artisanal cobalt-mining are appalling for all workers taking part in the activity. The “mines” are little more than rabbit holes dug out by hand, in the interior of which there is no shoring or other types of support to prevent cave-ins. Ore-laden rock is chipped in chunks from the veins and dragged out in sacks by the miners who often barely have room to crawl in and out. Later the rocks are hammered and washed by hand to remove the ore. Pay is based on production. On a good day of exhausting, back-breaking labor, a “digger” will make two or three dollars, according to on-site sources quoted in a Washington Post article.

Aggravating this kind of terrible exploitation still further, however, is the fact that much of the work in such mining operations is carried out by children. An estimated forty thousand minors, some of them no more than seven to ten years old, are being used as virtual slave labor in artisanal cobalt-mining operations in the Congo and elsewhere in the region, some four thousand in a single area of the Congo where this type of mining is prevalent. The proportion of adults to children laboring in artisanal mining operations is stunning: some estimates indicate a ratio of about sixty-forty.

The Congo has rich cobalt resources and provides about two-thirds of the world supply of this mineral. With the plethora of innovative new devices being invented and marketed each year, the demand for the cobalt used as a main ingredient in their batteries has spiked dramatically, with the price per pound for this metal having tripled in the last half-decade.

That should be good news for artisanal miners who sell their ore to the wholesale industrial market, but it’s not. They are barely able to scratch a subsistence from the earth’s crust—often even struggling to keep staples like salt and flour in their homes—with their children also carrying out slave labor in the mines, while most of the money tends to stick to the fingers of mostly Asian middlemen.

These intermediaries have created a complex supply chain that makes it difficult for major companies marketing cobalt-rich lithium-ion batteries in the cars and devices they manufacture to trace the cobalt back to its source. And although some major ones—like Apple and Amazon, and at least one major carmaker—have given ample lip service to the need to do so, in the back office of many global firms, it would appear it doesn’t make sense to investigate when getting to the bottom of the “mystery” promises to raise the cost of their raw materials.

The investigations, then, have fallen to global NGOs like Amnesty, to multilateral agencies like the UN, and to the news media—with particularly admirable but not exclusive initiatives, in this regard, having been embarked on to date by the Washington Post and CNN. CNN star reporter Nima Elbagir, who has done brilliant work on global slavery, prefaced her cobalt-mining exposé by saying that every tech company one talked to said how hard it was to trace cobalt back to its source. CNN had decided, she said, to do it for them.  

Despite sitting on top of some of the biggest mineral deposits on earth—so large that a French geologist once described its potential natural wealth as “a geological scandal”—in terms of per capita income, the Congo is one of the poorest countries on earth, with a per capita GDP equivalent to under four hundred dollars a year. The artisanal cobalt miners are clearly indicative of this level of poverty. This is also indicative of the fact that while concrete colonialism may have long since been driven out of Africa, economic colonialism continues to be alive and well there, particularly in the poorest yet most resource-rich nations, such as the Congo. In other words, it is still a matter of the technified “first world” exploiting the raw material rich areas of the “third world” that remain among the poorest and least developed nations on earth.

Lithium-ion batteries are at the heart of the latest technology. They are lighter, more powerful, last longer and are readily rechargeable. But while their dependability is also marketed as additionally being part of the “green” revolution, the human, environmental and social cost of their main element is clearly not in the spirit of sustainability.

In artisanal cobalt mining cave-ins and other mining accidents are extremely commonplace, and considering the absolute dearth of any sort of rules governing this activity or the implementation of any sort of safety measures whatsoever, the term “accident” must be used very broadly. The conditions in which adults and children alike work in these makeshift mines makes this an almost suicidal activity. As if that were not enough in itself, the cobalt mining process is also poisoning the water sources in the region, so that many of the miners who manage to survive their harsh working conditions are often falling ill with environment-related diseases.

When stories like these are brought to light, the usual reaction in business, government and among the general public is a lot of head-shaking, tongue-clucking, and hollow phrases regarding how awful that things like this can still go on in today’s world. But in the end, our attitudes in the developed world can only be seen as hypocritical if each of us doesn’t take action is some way, no matter how small, the correct the problem.

In this particular case, tech companies need to find out where their cobalt is coming from and to put pressure on their suppliers to commit to either requiring their sources to live up to global social and labor standards or risk losing their biggest customers. The governments of industrialized nations need to regulate in such a way as to force companies to take these due diligence steps or risk severe sanctions for purchasing raw materials produced by exploiting children. The media and multilateral agencies and NGOs need to keep digging and keep creating awareness among everyday consumers regarding this awful truth.

We, as consumers, for our part, should start being more conscientious is our purchases. We need to hold our favorite brands accountable for the products they make and market, and reward the ones that demonstrate impeccable corporate responsibility by preferring their products over those of firms that do not. Only in this way can we help effect solutions and deserve a little more the privilege of living fully in the post-industrial world.