Almost 75% of global production comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo - where there are also children toiling away in the mines.
Cobalt is a component in batteries for cell phones, EVs and e-bikes, but it’s also used in medical technologies and aircraft construction. Around three-quarters of the world’s supply of this coveted metal currently comes from the DRC in Central Africa. Kolwezi is known as the country’s cobalt capital. Industrial mines, like those operated by Swiss multinational Glencore and Chinese firms, are found here alongside illegal sites where hundreds of thousands of people hack the metal out of the ground with their bare hands.
Human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Save the Children estimate that tens of thousands of minors work in these illegal cobalt mines.
During one of his many visits to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Siddharth Kara, an author and Harvard academic who has spent 20 years researching modern slavery, met a young woman sifting dirt for traces of cobalt.
Priscille told him she had suffered two miscarriages and that her husband, a fellow “artisanal” miner, died of a respiratory disease.
“I thank God for taking my babies,” she said. “Here it is better not to be born.”
It is just one of many devastating personal accounts in Cobalt Red, a detailed exposé into the hidden world of small-scale cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The “quaint” moniker of artisanal mining, Mr Kara points out, belies a brutal industry where hundreds of thousands of men, women and children dig with bare hands and basic tools in toxic, perilous pits, eking out an existence on the bottom rung of the global supply chain.
About two-thirds of cobalt mining is carried out in industrial mines with the use of heavy machinery, and accompanied by health and safety standards.
The market for cobalt has exploded in recent years, with demand driven by the surge in production of batteries for electric cars. Its strategic importance will only grow, experts say, as carmakers aggressively scale up production of electric vehicles in the decades ahead.
Global demand for cobalt in the battery sector alone has tripled since 2011
1. Democratic Republic of the Congo
Cobalt production: 220,000 metric tons
2. Indonesia
Cobalt production: 28,000 metric tons