Today, Explained - The blood diamond of batteries

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

Cobalt is powering the electric vehicle revolution, but much of the world’s supply is mined under deadly conditions in Congo. Journalist Nicolas Niarchos explains Congo's resource curse. Today’s show was produced by Will Reid, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. My name's Nicholas Niarchos and I'm a freelance journalist based in New York. In 2014, a man started digging a hole in his backyard. He was digging a new toilet pit, and he was surprised when his shovel struck a brightly colored rock.

People in that area that he lived, which was the suburb of Kasulo in the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo, always talked about the richness below the soil. They talked about rich copper and cobalt mines that were situated near the town. And in the rainy season, sometimes the soil would go green with the mineral deposits. So he discovered a seam of cobalt, which is a mineral that is used in electric car batteries, cell phone batteries, computer batteries, lithium ion batteries. And cobalt has gone through this kind of boom in the last two decades, basically,

because of the demand for these batteries. So he chipped away some cobalt, took it to a local trader, and the local trader said, yes, this is worth something, actually. This is very good quality. The man came back, started digging out the cobalt himself. actually this is very good quality. The man came back, started digging out the cobalt himself, then he started hiring people to go down into these holes that he'd dug into his kitchen. And very soon his neighbors noticed unusual activities.

They heard the sort of telltale sounds of clanging at night. And they saw people bringing out sacks of ore, and they said, this person is exploiting his own parcel. Actually, he was renting. When his landlord investigated, the guy fled. The rest of the residents of the town sort of said, we're sitting on a gold mine here and started digging down. There was this amazing story of a church in which the pastor and the congregation began digging into the floor of the church,

stopping only for Sunday services. The mayor came out and said, listen, you can't do this. The governor came out and said, listen, you can't do this. And the people said, listen, this is our soil. We want to exploit it. And at one point they began sort of stoning local officials. So the exploitation of these rich seams of cobalt continued. So the town of Kasselau became completely unstable

and a local road was destabilized, in fact, and it was when that collapsed the governor said, we've got to do something about this problem. Long story short, the governor, he went to a Chinese firm and his family had business dealings with that firm. And that Chinese firm acquired the right to buy cobalt off miners in that parcel. So they walled off the parcel. The town was completely leveled. They removed the topsoil and they blasted down into the ground. And then they basically

allowed miners to go in and start digging in the ground. And the people who were displaced were given a couple of thousand dollars or a new home in this development called Semukinda, which I actually visited. There's really very little there. There's no school. And so they were shown these houses which looked beautiful in brochures. But in fact, when they arrived, they realized they were very, very poorly constructed. They leaked. The well in front of the houses didn't work. There was no water. The bathrooms didn't work and so on. So it's really a desperate situation for the people who live out there. And many of the people actually just left their new homes and went in search of a better life elsewhere. Nicholas, you wrote about what happened to Kasulo in an article for The New Yorker about the dark underbelly of cobalt mining

in Congo. Cobalt prices are booming right now because they're needed for smartphone batteries, for electric car batteries. What puts Congo at the center of that boom? So Congo sits atop 3.4 million tons of cobalt, and it's the largest proven reserve of the mineral worldwide. What's more, the cobalt is very close to the surface, so it's very easy to mine compared to other areas where it's much deeper. About 70% of the world's cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So it is what some officials there like to call, quote unquote, the Saudi Arabia of cobalt, referring to Saudi Arabia's rich oil deposits. Which is to say sort of that this new energy era will be about

cobalt, not gas. I don't think the new energy era is necessarily simply about cobalt, but it is about battery minerals, including cobalt. And cobalt is at the moment key for batteries. It stops some overheating and allows smaller battery sizes to be made. As long as that is a necessity, cobalt will be a key strategic mineral. And the fact that it's a key strategic mineral is complicated by the extraordinarily complex politics of Congo, which arise out of the ashes of a very violent colonization by the Belgians, a very corrupt dictatorship run by a US ally, Mobutu Sese Seko, who was the dictator who ruled from the 60s all the way until the 90s and basically stripped the country bare along with his cronies and became incredibly wealthy as a result. Which is to say that this

thirst for cobalt isn't the first time a foreign power has come into Congo to extract a very valuable resource. Absolutely not, no. So the Belgians came and extracted first rubber, which was known as red rubber, because they were so violent in their means of extracting it. Leopold wanted some part of the world where he could reign supreme and where he could make a lot of money. Famously, Adam Hochschild,

who is the author of King Leopold's Ghost, estimates that up to 10 million Congolese died as a result of that colonial extraction. 10 million? 10 million people, which is, I mean, Holocaust figure of people killed. Basically, his soldiers would go into village after village, would hold the women hostage in order to force the men of each village to go deep into the rainforest for days and eventually weeks out of each month and gather a monthly quota of wild rubber. And you can actually see photographs of these women hostages in chains. At the beginning of the 20th century, it became a direct colony under Belgium. And conditions did improve.

But, you know, they shifted away from extracting ivory and rubber because there were other sources of rubber in the world, and it wasn't quite as valuable. So they started looking at other deposits around Congo. And Congo is very rich in diamonds. It's very rich in copper. It's very rich in cobalt. It's very rich in gold. It's very rich in this mineral called coltan which is used in electric capacitors. To the extent that when the PlayStation 2 came out, which was a very coltan intensive device, this was in the late 90s during a period where Congo was really in a heavy civil war. Troops loyal to President Laurent Kabila, backed by their Zimbabwean and Angolan allies, grimly defend the airport northeast of Kinshasa, fighting off a determined

but apparently unsuccessful offensive by rebel forces. It kind of fueled the civil war in what became known as, quote unquote, the PlayStation War, which is pretty depressing. So bringing us back to this current moment, you've got this country that suffered decades of bloody colonialism and dictatorship and war. Now it's sort of a democracy, though a corrupt and problematic one, that's experiencing this cobalt boom. What does it mean for Congo?

The cobalt boom for Congo is not necessarily a sort of unrestrained good for the country. You know, when suddenly a rush for raw materials occurs in that sort of context, you see a lot of the wealth diverted away from the population. On the ground, what you see is a huge level of migration to the areas in which copper and cobalt is found. Both of these minerals are used in this new sort of technological world. And people sort of have rushed to mine it. And that's created a great deal of pressure on the local infrastructure. And you told us the story of Kassoulo, but what is this industry like more

broadly? Surely individual people are not providing the entire world's cobalt supply. Yeah, certainly not. The majority of cobalt is mined by large companies, mainly Chinese at this point. So it's anything from 10 to 30% is mined by artisanal miners, and the rest is mined by industrial miners, they're called. And artisanal mining is what exactly? So artisanal mining is basically people going down holes that have been dug in the ground, and they will chip away at a rock face,

literally people going down with metal bars to chip away at the rock face down in the hole and bring up minerals that they sell at a sort of marketplace. They sell to traders, often foreign traders. After they fill their bags with the cobalt, they sell the merchandise on the black market, which is controlled by Chinese companies. It's kind of anarchic, was the word that the governor used.

When we offered to sell a truckload of cobalt, nobody asked us who mined the mineral, only what the quality was. This man told us that the Chinese traders here bought all the cobalt and sold it mainly to one Chinese company, Congo Dongfang Mining, known locally as CDM. Artisanal miners are, to some extent, regulated. There's also a body called Sai Mapir, which provides them training. But in practice, most of the artisanal mines that I saw really followed very few safety regulations to the extent that many of the miners didn't have shoes. They certainly weren't wearing safety helmets.

They have no protective equipment and few tools, just a couple of shovels. And they're doing this knowing their previous three tunnels have collapsed. It seemed as if they were going down these pits hundreds of feet deep with only the most rudimentary of tools. By that I mean half a crowbar and a little plastic torch strapped to their head. And there's been some controversy in recent years that some of these artisanal miners can be kids, right? Because of the lack of governance, it's very difficult to make a full study of children mining in artisanal mines. But some of these artisanal miners are definitely kids.

I spoke to many children who had left the mining profession, and the range of ages for children working in these mines is quite staggering. I spoke to children who said that they started working in the mines as young as three, picking through rejected minerals to see if there was anything that had been rejected that was of value. Three years old. Yeah. So they're taught to learn the differences between minerals at a very young age. Often it happens a little bit later. That's a very extreme example. And as the boys, because it's mainly boys who are doing this work, become older and stronger,

they're actually sent down the mines themselves, which are incredibly dangerous, incredibly airless, and the material that they're mining is actually kind of toxic in itself. Girls will also do this kind of work, but mainly outside of the mines themselves, outside of the pits, and they will be washing ore. Their mothers will be washing ore. It's a site that you see on the side of the street. You're driving down the road and you see children going down to a little creek and sort of bringing down bags of minerals and washing them and then giving them to men on motorbikes who will speed off to go and sell it at the market. So you have these miners selling ore to traders or a Chinese company. They don't have safety equipment and they sometimes don't even have shoes. You have kids working in this industry.

And on top of all of that, the mining itself is pretty dangerous. The act of mining cobalt is particularly dangerous because the soil is fairly unstable and there are all kinds of stories of cave-ins. In any one cave-in, you know, 70, 100 miners can perish, especially if they're working in a kind of illegal fashion. So there are a lot of miners who will sneak onto industrial concessions at night, bribing police or soldiers who are supposed to be guarding the concessions. And they'll, you know, be chipping away in the middle of the night, and suddenly, there'll be a landslide. I don't want to dance around this. Is there a chance that someone driving a Tesla, or, you know, who just bought an iPhone 13 Pro Plus, or whatever it's called, could be using a device that has cobalt that was mined by a shoeless child with half a crowbar

and a plastic flashlight attached to his head in Congo. Absolutely, absolutely. But remember that the laptops that we're using to converse now and probably the Samsung that I'm holding to my head, I mean, yes, there's a chance that all of those devices might have Congolese cobalt mined in those situations in the battery. And it's funny, when you go down there, and I replaced my phone this spring, and I before having reported this piece, you know, I would think of it as an annoyance, it would be an expense and so on. But I didn't think of it as a waste. But there's something kind of incredibly affecting about seeing the conditions in which some of these

batteries are made. What I will say is that Apple and Tesla have both made efforts to clean up their supply chain. And other companies as well need to look at their supply chain in order to make sure that this is a type of activity that is not supported at all by the world's demand for cobalt and demand for lithium-ion batteries. I approached a child named Ziki who had just gotten out of artisanal mining. And he was sort of talking to me about his terrible experience, how he had started mining at age three, how he had gone through all these awful experiences. And I said to him, listen, my cell phone, you know, there's a new model of these cell phones that goes for more than $1,000. And he just kind of looked at it with this kind of great sadness. And he says, well, you know, that just makes me feel terrible. What to do about this cobalt predicament the world is in after an intermission here on Today Explained comes from Aura.

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Nicholas, I think we kind of understand the artisanal mining side of the picture now,

but tell me more about the big companies here. What's the industry look like in its biggest form? So the mining industry in its biggest form is a multinational industry in which large companies extract minerals from the ground and buy and sell them on the international market. And as you can imagine, these companies are incredibly wealthy, they're incredibly well-provisioned, and they have mine sites that reflect that.

We are receiving the ore coming underground, open pit, and after that we mill them, we grind them, and we mix with all of the chemicals to float and to get a good concentrate. A lot of those mines are now controlled by Chinese companies, whether it's as investors or as direct control through Chinese companies. And that hasn't always been the case. That hasn't always been the case. So after the Belgians left Congo, they continued to be very much involved in the mining industry. And Europeans were basically designated to run the mines for President Mobutu. But after a series of rebel attacks and mismanagement, the mines began to be run more by people from the country.

And the mines also, just before the Civil War and then during the Civil War, kind of started falling into disrepair. So the mines were sort of left fallow for a long time during the Civil War, which lasted from 1997 until you know the mid-2000s at that point western and other foreign mining companies started casting around for access to congo's rich mineral deposits and they began extracting copper and cobalt in the wake of the civil war. And that was able to fuel the government and fuel the ruling party as it sought to monopolize its hold on power. So at what point does the West move out and China move in? The Chinese started moving in in the late wars.

Back in 2008, the Democratic Republic of Congo struck a big deal with Beijing. China's state-owned firms would build hospitals and roads in return for revenues from copper and cobalt mines. And they would essentially buy the mines directly off these companies and they would work in partnership with the state-owned mining company which is known as jekamine in order to acquire these mines in the congo china has secured a considerable stake it will receive 68 percent of mining revenue the congolese government's share is 32 percent i think that there is a certain amount of risk involved with doing business in DRC. And a lot of Western companies, especially as oversight increased

and as more journalism and investigative work began to be done around these issues of corruption and so on, said, listen, we're going to wash our hands of this and sort of get away. And what do Chinese mining operations in Congo look like? Chinese mining operations in Congo, I mean, the big industrial mines would look like probably mines anywhere else in the world. There's been some sort of questioning of safety standards. But broadly, I mean, the big industrial mining outfits, and I don't want to speak about all of them,

but I did visit one in the south of Congo, and it appeared very well run and a sort of very professional-seeming place. However, there are the Chinese artisanal mining outfits which do not resemble that at all in any way, shape, or form. Those resemble something from a different period. You know, you see shoeless people and you see people being beaten savagely and by sort of overseers and you see kind of all kinds of terrible things. I think there is

a sense that there's like a sort of new form of colonialism going on by the Chinese. And there are definitely examples and videos that have been shown of Chinese overseers mistreating Congolese workers. But at the same time, you have to admit that these large industrial enterprises are run as large industrial enterprises in the 21st century. And how much are these large industrial enterprises serving the country? How much are they elevating the nation and the Congolese people? It's very difficult to tell what benefits the Congolese people because money is certainly paid back into the Congolese economy. But because of issues around corruption, a lot of that money doesn't actually reach the people.

And it probably ends up in bank accounts in different parts of the world that are controlled by local politicians. So despite, you know, decades of foreign mining operations that certainly fed hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars into the Congolese economy, I'm guessing you don't see a lot of electric cars rolling around in Congo. You certainly don't see electric cars rolling around in Congo. Is there a world in which, you know, Congo could integrate more of this

cobalt economy? And I don't know, you know, start building electric cars, start building iPhones, or is all of that manufacturing happening in the West or in China itself? All of that manufacturing is happening in the West or in China or abroad, basically. Ironically, one of Congo's issues is that it doesn't have a steady stream of electricity. And it's very difficult for businesses, especially these kind of high tech businesses to set up if they can't be assured of power 24-7, even though this is the country that produces the raw materials which go into batteries. So there are systemic issues that need to be dealt with before Congo can become a high-tech producer. But in the end of the day, you have to think that it's better to be doing this on the country's soil than shipping all this mineral halfway around the world and then you know putting it into the back

of a phone and then shipping it halfway around the world again and tweaking it a little bit and then selling it you know hundreds of miles away i mean i think that is a very wasteful way of looking at things beyond any issues of like corruption and local gain and then it's also a way in which people there are kind of left out of this boom. So what's the caring consumer supposed to do? The person who buys an electric car because they think they're doing the environment a favor or, you know, gets the newest iPhone because it's revolutionizing their lives and making everything easier. And at the same time, maybe just now, just right now, listening to this interview, discovering that the products that help their devices work are coming from this, in some cases, incredibly painful, dangerous, abusive system,

or in other cases, this incredibly dangerous, corrupt system. I mean, should we be hoping for cobalt alternatives? Or should we be hoping that, you know, the Congolese government gets its act together? Well, yes, there are battery scientists working on cobalt alternatives. That is true. The current options around batteries for electric cars don't have the range or the acceleration capabilities of a cobalt battery. And the current optionality for cell phones would require the batteries to be much larger and would require the phones to be larger as a result. So, I mean, either I suppose we could accept larger phones and slower cars, or, you know, we can try and hold these companies of slow one's impact on that cycle. It kind of just feels like one of those stories where there's no good solution.

There are good solutions. I mean, I think there's certainly a solution by which the people of Congo are remunerated in an acceptable way. There's a solution in which transparency is brought to Congo and accountability. It doesn't need to be this brutal. It doesn't need to be an industry that just takes away and doesn't give. But at the moment, the way in which it is set up

and the way in which it is developing, because all this stuff is accelerating as well, is incredibly brutal and, you know, creates these situations and these cycles of poverty and exclusion and ultimately sort of human rights abuses. Thank you. Find it at newyorker.com. Our show today was produced by Will Reed, edited by Matthew Collette, engineered by Afim Shapiro, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. I'm Sean Rotmusferum, and this is Today Explained. Thank you.