There’s a human cost to getting the materials that power your cell phone, laptop, and electric vehicle. Part of that human cost is the immense toll of mining cobalt, a mineral essential to rechargeable lithium-ion batteries.

75% of the world’s supply of cobalt is produced by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Congolese miners work in often harsh and dangerous conditions.

Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has been investigating these brutal mining practices. His new book Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives (St. Martin’s Press, January 2023) exposes the human cost of cobalt mining and in turn, the cost of our device-driven lifestyle.

Kara joins Esty Dinur on this edition of A Public Affair to tell us the stories of the Congolese miners – some of whom are children – to mine hundreds of thousands of tons of cobalt a year.

Siddharth Kara is an American author, activist, and expert on modern-day slavery and human trafficking, child labor, and related human rights issues. He’s an adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a Visiting Scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health. He’s the author of three previous books: Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (2009), Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia (2012), and Modern Slavery: A Modern Perspective (2017). You can follow him on Twitter @siddharthkara. 

 

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