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

Product Information

Regardless of its moral equivalence with historical slavery, today’s extreme labor exploitation is rooted in our modern economy. This rare, silvery metal is an essential component to almost every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today. 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. While Tesla’s responsible sourcing practices apply to all materials and supply chain partners, we recognize the conditions associated with select artisanal mining (ASM) of cobalt in the DRC. Roughly 2,300 kilometers southeast of Kinshasa at the opposite end of the country is Lubumbashi, capital of Haut-Katanga Province and administrative head of the mining provinces.

Book Review: “Cobalt Red” by Siddharth Kara - Foreign Affairs Book Review: “Cobalt Red” by Siddharth Kara - Foreign Affairs

It is also used in a wide array of emerging low-carbon innovations that are critical to the achievement of climate sustainability goals. Until this moment, I thought that the ground in the Congo took its vermillion hue from the copper in the dirt, but now I cannot help but wonder whether the earth here is red because of all the blood that has spilled upon it. He is a British Academy Global Professor, an Associate Professor of Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at Nottingham University, and a Senior Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. One might reasonably expect Kolwezi to be a boom town in which fortunes are made by intrepid prospectors. The NCSL distributed and promoted a document created in 2012 by the Utilites Telecom Council to address smart meter concerns.Mbuji-Mayi is capital of Kasai-Orientale Province, situated in the south-central part of the country and home to the largest diamond deposit in the world. That is the lasting image I take from the Congo—the heart of Africa reduced to the bloodstained corpse of a child, who died solely because he was digging for cobalt.

Cobalt Red is a flawed account of Congo’s Siddharth Kara’s Cobalt Red is a flawed account of Congo’s

Human rights abuses and child labor are rife in Congo’s mining sector; in 2016, Amnesty International and the watchdog group Afrewatch put out a report that tied companies like Apple and Samsung to exploitatively mined cobalt.The increased demand for cobalt pressured hundreds of thousands of Congolese peasants who could not survive without the dollar or two they earned each day to clamber into the ditches and tunnels, unprotected, to keep the cobalt flowing. The Congolese military and other security forces are omnipresent in mining areas, making access to mining sites dangerous and at times impossible.