The moral cost of rechargeable batteries

If you use a mobile phone or tablet or are contemplating the purchase of an electric vehicle to lower your carbon footprint and lead a more sustainable life, this book will make you uncomfortable. That’s because all those items rely on cobalt as a key component for the lithium-ion rechargeable batteries that make them work. Most of that cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where it is mined by what are euphemistically called artisanal miners—desperate young men, women, and children who have no protection, no access to medical care, and barely enough to eat and who work for a few dollars a day to help power our digital lives.

“Artisanal miners use rudimentary tools to extract dozens of minerals and precious stones in more than eighty countries across the global south,” writes Siddharth Kara. Because the work is almost entirely informal, they rarely have contracts for wages or working conditions. Artisanal miners are paid paltry wages on a piece rate basis and must assume all risks for injury, illness, or death.

Roughly 45 million people globally are involved in artisanal mining—90 percent of the overall mining workforce. “The most advanced consumer electronic devices and electric vehicles in the world rely on a substance that is excavated by the blistered hands of peasants using picks, shovels, and rebar,” writes Kara. “Labor is valued by the penny, life hardly at all.” He relates the stories of numerous women and children who are often forcibly relocated to dig for cobalt at hidden sites in wilderness areas where it is found. When one young boy is killed in a mining accident, Kara’s guide remarks, “No one wants to live out there! But there is cobalt and gold, so the army takes the poorest people and makes them dig. What did that child die for? For one sack of cobalt? Is that what Congolese children are worth?”