Name: Blood, Sweat, and Batteries: Inside Congo's Cobalt Mines
Uploaded: 2018-08-22
Duration: 9 min 22 s
Description: Africa's copper belt contains two-thirds of the entire world's cobalt, a mineral required for the production of cell phones, laptops, and most importantly, electric automobiles.

[MUSIC PLAYING] In July, we went to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is a giant country in Central Africa. It stretches down to Southern Africa. And we went to the southern part of the DRC, as it's known, which is called the Copper belt. It's the richest vein of copper anywhere on the planet, and it also contains about two thirds of the entire world's supply of cobalt. Cobalt is an essential ingredient. It's in every one of our smartphones. It's in our computers. And most importantly, it's in electric vehicles. And so as the world transitions to electric vehicles, the demand for cobalt has gone skyrocketing. We wanted to see how real local Congolese people were engaging in what's effectively very much like the old California Gold Rush. There are thousands of people who've just flooded into this area to dig for cobalt. Everything they find is worth a lot of money, at this point. There's no protective clothing. People are just wearing whatever they're wearing. The holes in the ground where people are digging are hand dug. Supports that they use to keep the shaft open are broken bits of metal, random bits of wood. A man goes down the hole with a burlap sack, a plasticky burlap sack which is attached to a bunch of ripped burlap sacks which act as rope, and he fills it full of cobalt. His teammates pull it up by hand. While we were there walking towards the mine, I saw this young kid walking towards me. He's 11 years old and he was carrying probably about 30 to 40, 50 pounds of cobalt on his back. He'd never been to school, totally illiterate, and that was his only job. The bottom line is, if you buy an electric vehicle, certainly if you buy smart phones, you really don't have 100% certainty that that mineral has not involved at some level child miners. It's our concern. Children are not supposed to work in the mines. And they're dying there, many are dying on bad conditions. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] So you have along the sides of the road tons of people who work there. You have people who are crushing up the cobalt. There are people who are weighing the cobalt. There are people who are loading it onto trucks. So there's hundreds if not thousands of people working. The market was probably the most important thing that we were able to photograph and report from, because it really is the point at which the cobalt switches from Congolese hands to international hands, and those hands are Chinese. Those huge Chinese cobalt importers have hundreds of middlemen buying bits of cobalt and then selling them on. So there's many, many layers to this business, and hence it's very difficult to trace exactly how the cobalt in your product is mined. This is a very complex and very difficult situation for tech industries to deal with. The global auto industry is now heavily implicated in the Congolese mining. Companies like Apple, Tesla, a couple of the auto companies are attempting now to create their own pipelines of cobalt supplies. It's a very difficult thing to do. Mostly, because they're somewhat late to the game. Companies have begun looking around to see if they can create alternatives to the lithium ion battery which needs cobalt. And they have made some progress in that respect. They have begun to develop ways of creating batteries that would use less cobalt. So far we have yet to see any battery that is invented that will need no cobalt at all. We were really kind of hounded by the local authorities and the local police. They pretty much blocked everything we wanted to see and wanted to do. You know, all the photographs that you see, the video you see was taken despite them rather than thanks to them. I had brought this GoPro along with me with the sole intention of putting it on somebody else's head to film what was going on. And I realized halfway through the reporting trip that, in fact, the story was also the way that the government was going out of its way to stop us working. So I ended up putting it on. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] The entire world, the entire world needs cobalt. And this one province of this one country has two thirds of the world's supply. That is an immense amount of power, and an immense amount of money. And you want to control that. Anybody would want to control that. And reporters showing up, and asking questions, and probing, challenges that power. Cobalt mining has a lot of problems in Congo, but it is a source of income for hundreds of thousands of people. This is a country with the most incredible intense level of poverty that you can imagine. People really have nothing, and given any opportunity to make a dollar a day, they will certainly rush to take it. My hope is that, the way Arab countries have benefited from the petrol, Congo at last can benefit from this mineral. And God has made it at the center of the wealth of the world. We need our leaders to know that this is our opportunity now to rise up and to be a powerful nation. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] Sadly, I think a lot of companies will invest a lot of money to try get out of the Congo altogether. And I say sadly because, honestly, the local people rarely fear that that's going to happen. But for a lot of companies sitting in Silicon Valley, it's easier for them to say, let's just put billions of dollars into creating a non-cobalt battery and get out of this country. [MUSIC PLAYING] 

Blood, Sweat, and Batteries: Inside Congo's Cobalt Mines

International

Africa's copper belt contains two-thirds of the entire world's cobalt, a mineral  required for the production of cell phones, laptops, and most importantly, electric automobiles.