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

by Siddharth Kara

Consider the first sentence, because this is the important one. If the OECD and its constituents concede that 70 percent of 72 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt “has some touch” with child labor, that would imply that half of the cobalt in the world was touched by child labor in the Congo. This fact alone indicted a preponderance of the global supply chain of cobalt, yet child labor was far from the only problem in the Congo’s artisanal mining sector. How much of the Congo’s cobalt was “touched” by the hundreds of thousands of Congolese people suffering the consequences of toxic exposure to cobalt, uranium, lead, nickel, mercury, and other heavy metals? How much was touched by the infants who inhaled hazardous mining dust every day at artisanal mines? What about the noxious gas clouds and toxic dumping that contaminated the air, land, crops, animals, and fish stocks of the Copper Belt, and what about the millions of trees chopped down to make way for enormous open-pit mines? Let us not forget the unknown number of people who were injured or worse in mining accidents. By the time one tallied such a list, how much cobalt would be left in the world that was untouched by catastrophe in the Congo?