Cobalt is a rare-earth mineral that is used to make batteries for phones, laptops, even electric cars. It is also the cause of severe abuse of workers, bordering on slavery.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is democratic in name only. Decades of dictatorship and rampant corruption in the DRC were reported in an article in The New Yorker by Nicolas Niarchos in May 2021.
Niarchos recounted that hundreds of thousands of Congolese people, including children, work in cobalt mining for less than $2 per day. Children are drugged to suppress their hunger, and if they don’t produce enough cobalt, they don’t get food.
In addition to slave wages, the workers are subject to toxic effects from the mining process, which can even contain radioactive materials. Health risks include lung diseases, cancer and birth defects transmitted from both male and female workers to their babies. As for health care, forget it, these are throwaway humans.
China is a bad actor in all this. Since it is a huge producer of devices using cobalt, China has tens of thousands of its people operating in Congo and supporting the regime which provides them with raw material for its manufacturing juggernaut.
Got an iPhone? So do I. We’re supporting the abusers of workers and children by buying products with blood batteries from Apple, Google, Dell, and Microsoft among others. The New Yorker article noted that these companies periodically proclaim their commitment to fair labor practices, but then keep doing business with the same Chinese companies who oversee the abuse to begin with.
Since China is a dictatorship, it feels no pangs of conscience when collaborating with Congo’s authoritarian leaders. The DRC has 4 million metric tons of cobalt reserves, more than the rest of the world combined, so does that leave us with no alternative?
The Eco Experts (www.theecoexperts.co.uk) reviewed the alternatives and found that nickel, manganese and iron can all be substituted for cobalt. In fact, China is already using iron in electric cars, and Tesla, Ford and Volkswagen plan to start using iron in their electric car batteries. Nickel and manganese are far more plentiful around the world than cobalt. These metals still present environmental and human rights abuses but their plentitude in many countries should make it easier to find fair trade production. A bright point is that researchers at the University of California have developed a nickel alloy that can compete with cobalt.
Still, if the phone and computer companies cared about the cruelty, poverty and diseases caused by cobalt in the Congo, they could do something to stop it. Their profits are hundreds of billions of dollars a year. How many billion is enough for any company to make? At what point does the human cost matter? Those tech firms could put pressure on the Chinese to clean up their act. What if they started paying people $50 per day instead of $2? People could make a decent living and the kids could go to school instead of working in the mines.
And guess what? We’ll pay whatever the cost because we can’t do without our devices, so those companies would still make hundreds of billions.
Frank Lingo, based in Lawrence, Kansas, is a former columnist for the Kansas City Star and author of the novel “Earth Vote.” Email: lingofrank@gmail.com. See his website: Greenbeat.world
From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2023
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