Cobalt, the mineral that makes our devices’ and cars’ lithium-ion batteries possible, is still being dug up with little regard for the miners
A months-long investigation by the Washington Post has found that rights abuses and questionable business practices are still common in the global cobalt supply chain that starts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and ends with the lithium-ion batteries in consumers’ iPads or smart cars.
The investigation has implicated multiple manufactures, including some of the world’s largest ICT and automotive concerns.
The Post investigation details the supply chain whereby “artisanal” miners, whose legal rights, tools, protective gear, as well as paydays are few and far between, dig out cobalt-bearing ore, and then sell it to trading houses or middlemen.
The main buyer for the smelted ore is Congo DongFang International Mining, a subsidiary of China’s Huayou Cobalt – and still a major supplier for Apple.
Huayou, alongside other Chinese state-owned enterprises, has recently purchased large tracts of land, with the accompanying mineral rights, from the DRC’s state mining concern, Gecamines, to streamline its African operations.
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Chinese entities have increasingly stepped into the market to secure long-term access, even as Western multinationals scale back their operations due to a production glut, South Africa’s Mail & Guardian reported in March.
Huayou has admitted to the Post that it possesses, “insufficient awareness of supply chain management.”
The goblin element
Fifty to sixty percent of the world’s cobalt supply cobalt is mined in the DRC, which has large, high purity deposits. Cobalt, whose name is derived from the German word for ‘gremlin,’ must be extracted from raw ore by processes such as electrolysis and grinding, and is also used to manufacture super-alloys for making aircraft engines.
Samsung and LG have stated that since 2015, they do not procure cobalt through Huayou. However, both previously did, indirectly, thanks to their relationship with several battery component manufacturers in China and South Korea that obtained cobalt from Huayou and used it to make batteries sold to major consumer manufacturers.
It is possible they still do, again indirectly, given the lack of data made available from their suppliers.
Other major consumer electronics companies such as Dell, HP, Motorola, Microsoft, Sony, Huawei, ZTE, Vodafone, and even Amazon have been implicated in this supply chain. But car makers, in fact, are driving much of the growing demand for cobalt these days, in order to develop more energy-efficient power systems.
Aside from China, by far the largest single importer, Japan and Finland are large markets for Congolese cobalt. Most admit, though, that they have not actually traced, or even been able to trace under existing supply chains, just where exactly they get their cobalt from.
Notably, cobalt is exempt from U.S. laws that cover potential abuses in mining other Congolese resources used in electronics manufacturing, such as gold (circuits) and coltan/tantalum (capacitors). Unlike these minerals, though, cobalt is far more widely used worldwide and not directly linked to any ongoing war profiteering.
Allegations of child labor slam DongFang’s extractive operations in the DRC, as they dog the country’s mineral industry as a whole. Congo’s mineral wealth has long been misused by both the state – the copper industry was routinely raided by longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko to support his vanity projects and lavish lifestyle – and other African nations who have fought wars on DRC territory since Mobutu was ousted in 1997.
During Mobutu’s decades-long rule, the damage to the cobalt industry was immense. Massive corruption meant that just as cellphones and laptops were becoming more commonplace in the 1990s, official output at the country’s top mines fell drastically: on the eve of Mobutu’s overthrow, the DRC accounted for just 7 per cent of world production; in 1985, that figure was 45 percent.
The various wars fought in the country since 1997 have not helped the industry get back on track, or the country’s larger economy. This is why so much of it remains in the hands of smallholders who often go into the sector for lack of better options.
The mining regions of the country are notoriously poor and short on other job opportunities. In the country, 110,000 to 150,000 people work as “artisanal” miners, according to Amnesty International.
Some of the country’s mineral was even stolen by occupying powers who invaded the country in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The UN Panel of Experts found that the post-Mobutu government’s nominal allies – Uganda, Burundi, and Rwanda – were financing their war effort in the DRC by shipping out mineral stockpiles from the territories they held for resale.
This affected the cobalt trade less than other minerals, but there has long been a thriving black market on the Zambian-Congolese border for both cobalt and copper.
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One of the reasons cobalt is so common in the DRC is that it is often found alongside copper, of which the DRC and neighboring Zambia are awash in.
Zambian cobalt, accounting for about a quarter of the global supply, is less pure than the deposits next door, though, and the industry there suffers from some of the same problems as in the DRC over labor violations and profit skimming.
Next steps
Relatively little cobalt goes into a single consumer electronics device – a few grams for a smartphone, and an ounce for a typical laptop – but the sheer volume of these goods on the market still counts for tens of billions of dollars’ worth of ore sales a year.
And the human cost of the supply chain does not end at the miners, but continues on to the manufacturing end, with long hours, low pay, and dangerous conditions for workers at the factories that actually put together a device’s components, lithium-ion batteries included.
The most widely discussed measure that can be taken to address the problem includes adding cobalt to the same processing standard (“3TG”) as gold or other minerals – though this would almost certainly require copper to be added to that list, too, since the two elements are mined in the same places by the same entities.
One of the major obstacles to this is that the governments on whose soil the mining takes place have mixed incentives to centralize production and impose better standards – although these would benefit the industry overall, corrupt parties prefer the situation to remain as it is.
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E-waste recycling can also help the situation, but has its own set of supply chain problems, as much of this detritus is “recycled” in developing countries by scrappers working in sub-optimal conditions. About 23 per cent of the world’s most developed nations’ e-waste has gone to the Third World for reprocessing.
There, in junkyards with few modern tools and heavy pollution, devices are burned and broken apart to recover components.
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The original article The human cost of our devices’ and cars’ batteries first appeared on Geektime.
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