Is your phone tainted by the misery of the

35,000 children in Congo's mines?

My field research shows that children as young as six are among those risking their
lives amid toxic dust to mine cobalt for the world’s big electronics firms
Fri 12 Oct 2018 09.00 BSTLast modified on Tue 6 Nov 2018 12.39 GMT

 Stones are rinsed and sorted near a Congo cobalt mine. More than 60% of the world’s cobalt
comes from the south-eastern provinces of DRC. Photograph: Siddharth Kara

Until recently, I knew cobalt only as a colour. Falling somewhere between the ocean
and the sky, cobalt blue has been prized by artists from the Ming dynasty in China to
the masters of French Impressionism. But there is another kind of cobalt, an
industrial form that is not cherished for its complexion on a palette, but for its
ubiquity across modern life.

This cobalt is found in every lithium-ion rechargeable battery on the planet – from
smartphones to tablets to laptops to electric vehicles. It is also used to fashion
superalloys to manufacture jet engines, gas turbines and magnetic steel. You cannot
send an email, check social media, drive an electric car or fly home for the holidays
without using this cobalt. As I learned on a recent research trip to the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, this cobalt is not awash in cerulean hues. Instead, it is
smeared in misery and blood.
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 An orphan girl rinses stones to sell to Chinese traders. Photograph: Siddharth Kara

Elodie is 15. Her two-month-old son is wrapped tightly in a frayed cloth around her
back. He inhales potentially lethal mineral dust every time he takes a breath. Toxicity
assaults at every turn; earth and water are contaminated with industrial runoff, and
the air is brown with noxious haze. Elodie is on her own here, orphaned by cobalt
mines that took both her parents. She spends the entire day bent over, digging with a
small shovel to gather enough cobalt-containing heterogenite stone to rinse at nearby
Lake Malo to fill one sack. It will take her an entire day to do so, after which Chinese
traders will pay her about $0.65 (50p). Hopeless though it may be, it is her and her
child’s only means of survival.

More than 60% of the world’s supply of cobalt is mined in the “copper belt” of the
south-eastern provinces of DRC. According to the government agency charged with
oversight of the informal or “artisanal” mining sector, at least 20% of this supply is
mined by locals like Elodie, called creuseurs. The remainder is produced by industrial
mines that are typically operated by foreign companies following the collapse of the
state-owned mining concern, Gécamines.

Across the south-eastern provinces, I observed that Chinese companies run many of
the industrial mines in the region. The Chinese also appear to run most of the “buying
houses” that purchase cobalt from children like Elodie. Every one of the 23 buying
houses I documented in detail were operated by the Chinese, and I must have seen a
hundred more with Chinese traders inside.

Chinese processors then mix cobalt from industrial and artisanal sources during a
preliminary refining stage to produce crude cobalt hydroxide, which they drive to
ports at Dar es Salaam and Durban for export to China.
After additional refining in China, the cobalt is sold to major component
manufacturers and consumer electronic companies across the world.

Children as young as seven mining cobalt used in

smartphones, says Amnesty
 
Read more

Such companies are collectively worth trillions of dollars. Yet according to Amnesty
International in a report at the end of 2017, none of them are making sufficient
efforts to ensure that their riches are not being built on the backs of the oppressed
women, men and children of the Congo who toil in putrid conditions, endure pitiful
wages, grave injury and risk death to mine their cobalt.

I documented the horrors at 31 artisanal mining sites in the south-eastern provinces,

including several previously undocumented sites in remote mountains near the
Zambian border. Based on the data I gathered, I estimate there are more than
255,000 creuseurs mining cobalt in DRC, at least 35,000 of whom are children, some
as young as six.

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 Cobalt mining site near Kasulo. Photograph: Siddharth Kara
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While market prices of cobalt have spiked 300% in the past two years, none of that
increase makes its way down to creuseurs like Arthur. The 16-year-old boy joined a
group of young men who spent two months digging a tunnel 26m straight down
before they hit a heterogenite vein. Now they descend into darkness each day,
spending up to 24 hours at a time in narrow tunnels unable to stand, hacking away
for cobalt. Every minute is suffused with dread, because many tunnels have collapsed
in Kasulo, burying alive everyone inside.

At the surface, I follow the men from Arthur’s tunnel with several sacks of cobalt to
one of the dozens of Chinese buying houses nearby. The entire neighbourhood has in
fact been walled off, in an effort to keep people from documenting the perilous
conditions.

The cobalt under Kolwezi is purer than at Elodie’s site, so the traders at the nearby
buying house pay a higher rate for each kilogramme. It works out to roughly $1.80 a
day in income for Arthur, but he is unlikely to get to keep all of it. Numerous local
creuseurs told me that children like Arthur are forced to pay bribes to the local
government functionaries who are supposed to ensure there are no children working
at sites like Kasulo.

In mine after mine, I witnessed heartrending suffering at the bottom of global cobalt
supply chains.

The companies that source cobalt from DRC are surely aware of the appalling
conditions under which the mineral is mined in some sites in the country. Aside from
the Amnesty reports, labour abuses linked to cobalt mining in the region have been
widely documented by human rights groups and by media organisations across the
world.
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 Children fill sacks with cobalt. Photograph: Siddharth Kara

Yet while major consumer electronic and automobile brands state they do not tolerate
child labour in their supply chains, none have invested enough resources or time into
ensuring that they can adequately address the human rights abuses that could be
lurking in the products they sell to millions across the world. They have consistently
shifted responsibility for human rights abuses in the Congo on to their Chinese
suppliers.

In the absence of full accountability, suffering can run riot. No company should be
able to jettison their responsibility for the vicious and unjust treatment of the people
who mine cobalt and other minerals simply because they are separated from them by
a few thousand miles, and a few layers in their supply chains.

From stone to phone, they must be accountable.

Any company sourcing cobalt from DRC must establish an independent, third-party
system of verification that all mineral supply chains are cleansed of exploitation,
cruelty, slavery, and child labour. They must invest whatever is needed to ensure the
decent pay, safe and dignified working conditions, healthcare, education and general
wellbeing of the people whose cheap labour they rely on.

There is little we can do as consumers at present, apart from refusing to buy their
products until they take sufficient action.

A gust of wind swept across Elodie’s mine, swirling toxic dust over every inch of child
and infant. Her son awoke, crying meekly. She wiped the grit from his face and sat in
the dirt to feed him.

She asked me what I was going to do when I left her and her baby.

I wanted to tell Elodie I would try to help. I wanted to tell her that despite all the
evidence to the contrary, there were people in the world who cared about her and her
son.

But I left in silence. I knew these words would be worthless.