- Estimates suggest that as many as 11,000 men and women work on the site, the majority of whom have no other means of deriving a livelihood.
- Risking their lives, they tunnel deep into the red earth, excavating cobalt in shafts that descend as deep as 100 metres, and yet they receive almost none of the profits.
- This story of labour exploitation and unequal exchange in Africa has become an all-too-familiar one to me.
- I was eager to visit the site because I had heard many encouraging things about it.
- Most artisanal mining sites are found in remote locations, remain unplanned and unregulated, and are subject to a host of social and environmental problems.
- But at the same time, there has been much fanfare around the idea of organising artisanal miners into cooperatives, as a potential solution to this problem.
- The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.
- There are people who come from Kasai, the Chinese who leave China to come here, Canadians who leave their country to come here.
- It is very good.
‘The work we do is hard’
- Many told me they only started mining because they wanted to create a better life for their kids.
- It is easy to understand why a parent would tolerate hardship, injustice and risk, if it could help their children.
- We only do this work because we don’t have the means to survive.
- The work we do is hard because it’s a job you do all day long.
- We only do this work because we don’t have the means to survive.
‘We miners die a lot’
- Six miners were killed and the depth and design of the tunnels meant that the bodies could not be recovered.
- And to be sure, all the miners I spoke to feared such a disaster could happen to them at any time.
- Death and injury is common among artisanal miners, due to both tunnel collapses and working without personal protective equipment.
- We miners die a lot.
- We miners die a lot.
Toxic dust and birth defects
- Further compounding the hazardous working conditions, cobalt dust is toxic, affecting all those working in mines, but also those in the wider community.
- That research also found high concentrations of uranium in the urine of exposed children and miners.
- A Lancet study found that pregnant women living in cobalt-mining communities have the highest levels ever reported of heavy metals in their blood.
- The same study demonstrated a five-fold increase in risk of birth defects in babies born to fathers working in cobalt mines.
- Alphonsine, eloquently described the horrific conditions that washers must endure:
There are several problems in doing this work.
- Recent comparisons of time-lapse satellite imagery over the past five years demonstrates the dramatic growth of cobalt mines in and around Kolwezi.
The invisible face of the cobalt rush
- Hunting for the buried blue treasure – a key ingredient in the lithium-ion batteries used in consumer electronics and electric vehicles that are vital to global efforts to combat climate change – artisanal miners like Ghislain have long been the invisible face of the cobalt rush.
- The Congolese cobalt rush fuels a multi-billion-dollar industry for international mining companies and buying agents – often from China – that have moved into the country.
- Southern Congo sits upon 3.4 million tons of cobalt, an estimated two thirds of the world’s known supply.
- Alphonsine told me that she didn’t know what happened to the cobalt she washed, after it left the site.
- Instead of buying well so that we too can win, they buy the products maliciously.
- As the world transitions to electric vehicles, competition over supplies of cobalt continues to intensify, with global demand set to increase up to eight-fold by 2040.
- Against this backdrop, the OECD estimates that there are more than 200,000 creuseurs, often labouring alongside large-scale industrial operations, who extract up to 30% of Congo’s cobalt.
Child labour
- Such claims have provided fertile ground for a high-profile legal case against the world’s largest tech companies, launched in December 2019 by Congolese families, over deaths and serious injuries sustained by child labourers in cobalt mines.
- In October 2022, the US Department of Labour added lithium-ion batteries to its list of goods produced by child labour.
No such thing as ‘clean cobalt’
- Profit margins are much higher when it’s possible to purchase cobalt that is extracted under slave-like conditions.
- And the reality is that cobalt unearthed by creuseurs is bought by agents and processed alongside cobalt from large-scale mines, with over 80% of it then being refined in China.
- As things stand, there is no such thing as “clean cobalt”.
Plausible deniability
While the negative impacts of the cobalt boom may be increasingly visible and have now become impossible to ignore, industry is not held accountable, partially because it has found new ways to hide its exploitative business practices.
- Complexity in the supply chain helps big corporations to demand profit-boosting efficiencies at arms’ length, giving them plausible deniability for the consequences of their actions.
- These companies also have become adept at spinning their purported efforts to improve conditions.
- Look at their websites and you’ll probably see a massive section devoted to sustainability and community-building.
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For this research, Roy Maconachie received funding from the Global Challenge Research Fund (GCRF), the Bath Research in Development (BRID) Fund, and the Bath Impact Fund.
