The Invisible Trillion · The Mining and E-Waste Question, Honestly

The Cobalt Story

Let me start with the worst one, because if you’ve heard one mining horror story, it is probably this one.

About 70% of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo — specifically from Katanga Province in the southern part of the country. Cobalt is used in lithium-ion battery cathodes. It makes the batteries more stable and longer-lived. Every smartphone, every laptop, and most electric cars on Earth today contain cobalt that was, with high probability, mined in the DRC.

Most DRC cobalt — maybe 80% — comes from industrial mines, which are bad in the ordinary ways big mines are bad (environmental destruction, corruption, poor labor conditions), but roughly comparable to mines elsewhere in the world.

The other 20% comes from what are called “artisanal” mines. This is a polite word. In practice, artisanal mining means people — including, yes, children — digging cobalt ore out of the ground with hand tools, sometimes in shafts that have no structural support, sometimes with no protective equipment of any kind. Workers get paid a few dollars a day. Cave-ins happen regularly. Long-term exposure to cobalt dust causes respiratory diseases and cancer. Children working in these mines — estimated at 40,000 in the DRC, though real numbers are impossible to verify — are sometimes as young as seven.

The material from artisanal mines flows into the same supply chain as the material from industrial mines, gets refined at the same facilities (mostly in China), and ends up in batteries indistinguishable from the “clean” kind. Unless the battery manufacturer has invested heavily in supply chain traceability — and most haven’t, until recently, under pressure from regulators and reporters — there is no way to know whether the cobalt in a specific device came from an industrial mine or a collapsing pit with a 12-year-old in it.

This is an unambiguously bad situation. I am not going to soft-pedal it. You have likely benefited from it, as have I. The smartphone economy is partially built on it. Pretending otherwise is dishonest, and pretending it will fix itself is naive.

What is happening, slowly: major companies (Apple, Tesla, the big automakers) are spending serious money on traceability. Some are reducing cobalt content in their batteries, because it’s valuable in its own right to depend less on DRC supply. Battery chemistries that use less cobalt or no cobalt (lithium iron phosphate, for instance) are growing fast — China’s new EVs are mostly cobalt-free. This is progress. It is also slow, and the industry has known about artisanal mining for at least 15 years, so the progress should have been faster.

If you want to do something about this specific issue, the most effective thing is probably to pay attention to which companies are being transparent about their supply chains and which aren’t, and to support regulations (like the EU’s Battery Passport initiative) that force everyone to disclose. Individual consumer choice here has limited leverage — all smartphones source from roughly the same refineries — but collective pressure has moved the industry, slowly, in the right direction.

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