Report: Electric Vehicles Dependent on Exploitation of Miners in the Congo

Raphael was described by his family as a “bright and cheerful child” who, at the age of 12, wanted nothing more than to get an education. However, his family in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was unable to afford the monthly tuition fees required to send him to school. Like many children living in poverty in the DRC, Raphael began working in an industrial cobalt mine near Kolwezi, the southern provincial capital where booming mining industry feeds global demand for batteries that power products such as computers, smartphones and electric vehicles.

When he was 15 years old, Raphael was killed alongside 30 other workers — also known as “diggers” — when a tunnel in the cobalt mine collapsed. Along with 13 other families from the Congo, in 2019 Raphael’s family joined a lawsuit filed in the United States against Google, Apple, Microsoft, Dell and Tesla that accused the companies knowingly benefiting from forced labor and child exploitation at the bottom of their supply chains.

In May 2024, a federal appeals court dismissed the case, a decision anti-labor trafficking advocates said was a setback in their effort to combat child labor in Big Tech’s international supply chains. While the court recognized that certain subsidiaries of international mining companies comingled cobalt from both modern industrial mines and more abusive small-scale operations, it found that buyers could exercise little control over bad actors on the ground. The very size and complexity of the global supply chain shielded the companies from liability.

Raphael’s story is just one of many from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the growing cobalt mining industry is rife with abusive child labor, hazardous working conditions, toxic pollution, and other threats to the environment and human rights, according to a new report from Public Citizen and Friends of the Congo.

“The Kolwezi region supplies the world with the cobalt that powers technological advances, but the locals are bearing the brunt of the exploitative mining industry,” said Iza Camarillo, lead author of the report and research director for Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, in a statement.

The climate crisis is here, and the transition away from fossil fuels in the United States and other wealthy countries is struggling to meet the pace demanded by intensifying storms, deadly wildfires and rising seas. Global demand for cobalt used to make lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles is exploding and only expected to grow as wealthy nations electrify transportation in order meet international climate commitments, according to the World Bank.

Up to 50 percent of the world’s known cobalt reserves are found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the State Department estimates that $24 trillion worth of copper, lithium and nickel is waiting to be exploited, according to the report. The country is a linchpin in the electric vehicle supply chain; currently the DRC supplies enough cobalt to meet about 70 percent of the global demand. But most of that cobalt produced in country is processed elsewhere, eventually making it into electronics used around the world.

Despite the mineral wealth contained within its borders, the DRC remains one of the five poorest countries in the world after more than a century of colonization and extraction.

Melinda St. Louis, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, said the United States and other wealthy nations of the Global North are historically top producers of climate altering pollution, so it’s crucial that they make investments to transition their large economies toward cleaner energy. However, some of the pathways receiving the most investment — such as the move toward electric vehicles — threaten to extend the legacy of colonialism that impoverished nations across Africa and the Global South.

“It is absolutely urgent that we do make this transition, and yet we have this danger of replicating that extractive model of the fossil fuels from the past by extracting the minerals we need for these batteries without concern for Indigenous communities on the environment and so forth,” St. Louis told Truthout in an interview. “In the name of our green transition we can be complicit in these violations.”

Historically, resource extraction in the Congo and other parts of Africa during the colonial era was done with little regard for local communities or environmental sustainability, enriching foreign nations in the Global North while impoverishing locals and robbing them of resources.

The DRC remains burdened by extraction today, as multinational corporations operating in opaque supply chains reap the benefits as the communities that produce cobalt and other minerals contend with the ecological damage caused by mining and intense economic inequality, according to the report.

Some cobalt in the DRC is extracted through what’s considered an “informal” labor arrangement of “artisanal” mining — terms that obfuscate the reality of the work being done. Artisanal miners are workers, including children, who use shovels and other rudimentary tools to dig for cobalt at smaller-scale operations. These “diggers” are exposed to toxic chemicals at the mines while being paid as little as $2 a day.

The DRC’s Trade Union Confederation estimates that 97 percent of the nation’s workers are employed within the “informal economy,” mostly as miners and agricultural workers, and often face hazardous or exploitative working conditions. A 2023 human rights report by the State Department said the DRC government did not effectively enforce its labor laws protecting workers from exploitation and union busting.

The results are tragic. Death is common in the mines, especially due to collapses at sites operated by “artisanal” miners, who have dug up to 15,000 tunnels without ventilation or supports to prevent the earth from collapsing in on them. Forced labor at cobalt mines is “notably rampant,” the report notes, with workers coerced under the threat of violence or economic deprivation.

Mining devastates environments across the world, and the DRC is no different. Mines often leach toxic chemicals into water supplies and require intense deforestation that contributes to climate change. In the DRC, breaches of dams and impounds containing mining waste and spills of sulfuric acid resulted in at least 14 significant toxic pollution incidents in the DRC’s mining region in recent years.

Post-spill cleanup in all cases was inadequate, according to the report, which cites 22 studies that found the mining region’s rivers, lakes and wetlands to be severely polluted.

People in the DRC are also forced out of their homes and communities to make way for mining operations. Theft of land from Indigenous people is well documented, and forced evictions are common, often under the threat of violence. Entire communities are destroyed as mining operations expand, and the compensation provided by mining companies is often inadequate, according to the report.

“It’s the same exploitative pattern from the colonial era,” St. Louis said.

Demand for cobalt continues to grow, particularly in the U.S., where the Inflation Reduction Act championed by President Joe Biden offers consumers a tax credit up to $7,500 for buying an electric vehicle. The law requires that a certain percentage of the minerals used to make the batteries for electric vehicles are imported from countries with free trade agreements with the U.S., so the Biden administration is rushing to negotiate so-called Critical Minerals Agreements.

Under the Treasury Department’s interpretation of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Critical Minerals Agreements qualify as free trade agreements if they meet certain criteria, such as eliminating trade barriers and restrictions on exports. Labor unions and human rights groups have criticized the Treasury Department’s criteria as vague and inadequate, with language that essentially makes the establishment higher environmental and labor standards optional.

So far, the U.S. has only ratified a Critical Mineral Agreement with Japan. The deal has faced bipartisan criticism for circumventing Congress and lacking enforceable environmental and worker safety standards.

Maurice Carney, executive director of the Friends of the Congo, spent the past summer interviewing diggers in the mines around Kolwezi for a documentary. Despite years of coverage in the international media about the exploitative conditions in the mines, Carney said the DRC government has made little progress enforcing its own labor and environmental laws.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and European Union partnered with the DRC, Zambia and Angola to rehabilitate the Lobito corridor railroad connecting the mining region directly to ports on the west coast of Africa for increasing exports of cobalt. While wealthy countries in the Global North may have more robust protections for workers and the environment, U.S. companies tend to ignore those standards when the bottom of their supply chain is in Africa, Carney said.

“The Lobito rail corridor runs from the heart of the mining district out to the Lobito port in Angola, it’s being rehabilitated in an effort to get access to critical minerals more readily and more easily, cutting the transport time because of the traditional routes from the Congo go out through [the] Indian Ocean or through Jordan,” Carney told Truthout in an interview. “The rail corridor will be much shorter than those traditional routes.”

Carney said the Lobito corridor railway runs through DRC’s historic copper belt that was first exploited by mining companies from the Global North. The U.S. sees the railway’s rehabilitation as crucial not only to increase the supply of cobalt exported to the West, but also as a counterweight to China’s Belt Road initiative, a massive infrastructure project connecting China to countries across Africa and the Global South. The White House claims the partnership will “unlock the enormous potential of this region” of sub-Saharan Africa.

Thanks to cobalt mining, Carney said the legacy of colonialism lives on in the Congo.

“If you are building something that is in alignment with the historical extraction practice, what evidence is there that this will be any different,” Carney said. “The rehabilitation of the rail line is entirely consistent with what has been going on the past 130-plus years.”