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

by Siddharth Kara

By the late twentieth century, mining contributed to almost every aspect of modern life. Steel was used for buildings, homes, bridges, ships, trains, vehicles, and planes. Aluminum, tin, nickel, and other metals were used in thousands of industrial and consumer applications. Copper was used for electrical wiring and circuitry, military ordnance, and industrial machinery. Petroleum derivatives gave us plastics. Advancements in agricultural productivity would not have been possible without machinery from mined materials. Although today’s trillion-dollar global mining industry is dominated by coal, iron, bauxite, phosphate, gypsum, and copper, the so-called strategic and rare earth elements used in modern technology devices and renewable forms of energy are rapidly growing in economic and geopolitical importance. Many of these strategic minerals can be found in central Africa, chief among them cobalt.