“They’re digging in trenches and laboring in lakes, hunting for treasure in a playground from Hell. Hard enough for an adult man. Unthinkable for a child.”
– CBS News finds children mining cobalt for batteries in the Congo.

Like bookends propping up a centuries long story of colonization, resource extraction, and war, veiled by notions of convenience and promises of tech “progress-topia,” people are slaving away mining for minerals and dismantling e-waste so the story can persist. A new story is long overdue – one of satiety and inter-being that benefits all living beings and Mother Earth. 

Rare earth elements (REE), aka rare metals (RM) or alloys are used in nearly all our technology and batteries. With the push to connect every “thing” possible to the internet and the rapid move to AI and so-called “renewables” the need for more of these elements is expected to grow. Rare earth elements are foundational for the war industry for infrastructure, batteries, weapons, and communications on land, in space and in the sea.

Though these rare earth elements are abundant in many countries, what makes them “rare” is that only a tiny fraction can be extracted from a given sample of earth.

Once the REEs are extracted, they are taken to refineries for smeltering, and then shipped to technology manufacturing facilities, batteries et al, and then once assembled, the products are transported to market. Each step of this process is fossil fuel intensive.

Additionally, both mining and refining introduce large amounts of toxins into the air, water, crops, and soil nearby, and impact the health of miners, farmers, and wildlife.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) sits on 24 trillion dollars of resources for which the global north is clamoring. The DRC has been at the heart of the global rush to extract these minerals through both industrial (presumably slightly better working conditions) or artisinal (make-shift) mining. Being an unstable country for centuries due to prior colonialism it is prone to corruption and human rights abuses both from within and without.

The production of our electronic technologies has fueled war, murder, rape, and child labor in the DRC. According to World Without Genocide at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law, approximately 6 million people have died as a result of conflicts fueled by the pursuit of rare earth minerals needed for our electronics. Hundreds of thousands of women have been raped and sold back to villages for ransom, and Unicef estimated that in 2016, there were about 40,000 children working in mines across the Congo.

Murky supply chains mix the artisanally mined cobalt with industry cobalt to keep the costs down and profits up. The only change now is the virtue signaling of companies to the contrary with websites that now host sections on “sustainable practices” and “community building” to placate public conscience for being complicit. With the push toward AI and “renewables”, the situation is becoming yet more dire.  

About 20% of mines in the DRC are artisanal, meaning make-shift operations, while the remainder are industry operations and the working conditions slightly less harsh and the pay fairer. But unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Murky supply chains mix the artisanally mined cobalt with the industry cobalt to keep the costs down and profits up.

Human ramifications are two fold:

1) miners in the DRC, including young children, slave away to extract cobolt, copper, nickel and coltan under extremely hazardous conditions and are paid pittance.

2) Geopolitical tensions are on the rise as the US tries to play “catch up” with China which has captured 73% of the global supply chain of rare earths.

The current push for electric vehicles (each of which requires 20 pounds of cobalt), “renewables”, AI and an all-things-connected world will likely bring more hardship, child labor, and death while continuing to ravage the Earth.

Other sources

REEs are also found abundantly on the seabed as well as on the moon and asteroids. Access to ocean minerals depends on the ratification of United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, aka High Seas Treaty, by the International Seabed Authority which is currently in process. The environmental impacts of deep sea mining are an unknown and in the words of David Attenborough

The rush to mine this pristine and unexplored environment risks creating terrible impacts that cannot be reversed. 

For more on mining asteroids, check out Conflicts with Asteroid Mining by the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.