Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

by Siddharth Kara

I learned from a few négociants at the village that they typically made three or four runs each night from Fungurume, for which they earned around ten to fifteen dollars per run. It was a substantial income for one night of work that might take an artisanal miner weeks to earn. I also confirmed that the Chinese buyers paid some of the villagers to use their huts as depots. Based on the volume of transactions I witnessed, it seemed plausible that hundreds of tons of copper-cobalt ore were being purchased through this marketplace each year. The informal and all but untraceable nature of the marketplace made it impossible to discriminate the source of cobalt once it was thrown into the same batch of acids for processing industrially mined ore. What else could the purpose of this kind of remote night marketplace be, other than to launder artisanally mined cobalt into the formal supply chain completely out of view, and certainly beyond the scope of any tracing or auditing of cobalt supply chains that were purportedly taking place? Can any company at the top of the chain legitimately suggest that the cobalt in their devices or cars did not pass through a village marketplace like this?