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

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In fact, no one seems to accept responsibility at all for the negative consequences of cobalt mining in the Congo—not the Congolese government, not foreign mining companies, not battery manufacturers, and certainly not mega-cap tech and car companies. The RMI promotes the responsible sourcing of minerals in accordance with the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights.

To ensure slave or child labor is not used in creating any device I use, I am willing to pay double, triple or quadruple for every device I own if that is what it takes. Honestly, this book can be extremely heavy at times but I powered through because I needed to know more.Crucially, Katangan leaders never fully subscribed to the premise that their mineral riches should be shared with the nation. You father is an “artisanal” miner who extracts crude cobalt from a local mine which is mixed with copper, tin, lead and traces of uranium. After all, who is going to go all the way to the Congo and prove otherwise, and even if they did, who would believe them?

Everyone who has a mobile phone, charger or battery should listen to or read this book to understand the cost to other people's lives in contributing to our entitled consumer desires to have the latest technology. In the interim, the country was subjected to one violent coup after another, first with Joseph Mobutu, who ruled the Congo from 1965 to 1997, followed by Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s reign from 1997 to 2001, followed by his son Joseph Kabila from 2001 to 2019. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed.Heavy metals, including cobalt, lead, copper and even uranium, are also in your mother’s blood stream, leeching through the breast milk and they are also flowing through your body as well. They will tell you that they uphold international human rights norms and that their particular supply chains are clean. At no point in their history have the Congolese people benefited in any meaningful way from the monetization of their country’s resources.