Then it’s in the formal supply chain, and there’s no disaggregating it from what was dug through industrial means because it’s all dumped together to be processed. There’s this laundering mechanism of traders and buying houses and depots that pay a few dollars a sack to the artisanal miners and then turn right back around and sell those sacks straight to industrial mining companies or processing facilities. Everything that artisanal miners dig out of the ground is sold through intermediaries who then sell it to formal mining companies. Kara: A shadow economy exists underneath the formal economy. Subscribe to the E360 Newsletter for weekly updates delivered to your inbox. And that’s called artisanal mining, meaning people with their hands as opposed to heavy equipment. In fact, it’s grindingly poor people scraping and scrounging in pits and trenches with pickaxes, shovels, their bare hands, strips of rebar, in tattered rags as they gather up cobalt-bearing ore, stones, and pebbles into sacks. It makes you think of craftsmen or people baking bread or something. Kara: The term is just nonsensical in its inaccuracy. So I redirected all my efforts toward trying to research what was happening and raise awareness.Į360: You talk about “industrial” mines and “artisanal” mines. I made a first trip in 2018, and I was expecting to see some pretty miserable conditions, but the scale of it, the severity of what was happening, the enormity of the violence against the people and environment there - it really shocked me. I had no idea at that time about this metal and how it related to rechargeable batteries. Siddharth Kara: I started hearing from colleagues in the field around 2016 that there were issues with how cobalt was being mined in the Congo. Yale Environment 360: How did you come to focus on this topic? “Environmental destruction, human destruction, labor exploitation, public-health catastrophe,” he says. Chan School of Public Health and the author of three previous books on modern-day slavery and sex trafficking, Kara documents how the Congolese government, Chinese tech companies, and every one of us have become unwitting participants in what can only be characterized as a humanitarian crime. Kara provides firsthand testimony from dozens of Congolese caught up in the race to harvest cobalt - a frenzy that has resulted not just in illness and untold deaths, but in the wholesale contamination of the region’s water, soil, and air.Ī fellow at Harvard’s T.H. To report his latest book, Cobalt Red, Kara traveled into militia-controlled mining areas of that troubled nation, where five-year-old children wielding crude shovels and scraps of rebar represent the bottom of a global supply chain that ends on the factory floors of some of the world’s richest and most powerful companies. But as author and contemporary-slavery expert Siddharth Kara says in an interview with Yale Environment 360, those rechargeable batteries require cobalt to function, and 75 percent of the world’s supply of that mineral is mined from the rich earth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Subsidiaries, affiliates, partners or third party service providers (including but not limited to Bazaarvoice, Inc.)and their respective directors, officers and employees.As countries around the world look to pivot quickly to clean energy, demand for the lithium-ion batteries used to charge our smartphones, laptops, and electric vehicles is booming. None of the content that you submit shall be subject to any obligation of confidence on the part of Bookswagon, its agents, Not Bookswagon, are responsible for the contents of your submission. However, Bookswagon reserves the right to remove or to refuse to post any submission to the extent authorized by law. You acknowledge that you, Generally posted within two to four business days. Bookswagon reserves the right to change, condense, withhold publication, remove or delete anyĬontent on Bookswagon's website that Bookswagon deems, in its sole discretion, to violate the content guidelines or any other provision of these Terms of Use.īookswagon does not guarantee that you will have any recourse through Bookswagon to edit or delete any content you have submitted. All content that you submit may be used at Bookswagon's sole discretion.
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