And yet, lo and behold, at most of the industrial mines, there is some artisanal mining taking place. Technically, under the law, there should not be artisanal mining taking place in any industrial mine. Interview Highlights On how 'artisanal' cobalt mines continue to operate in the DRC - despite being illegal The DRC produced approximately 74% of the world's cobalt in 2021. Some 20,000 people work at Shabara artisanal mine in the DRC, in shifts of 5,000 at a time. They use pickaxes, shovels, stretches of rebar to hack and scrounge at the earth in trenches and pits and tunnels to gather cobalt and feed it up the formal supply chain.' 'People are working in subhuman, grinding, degrading conditions. 'You have to imagine walking around some of these mining areas and dialing back our clock centuries,' Kara says. In his new book, Cobalt Red, Kara writes that much of the DRC's cobalt is being extracted by so-called 'artisanal' miners - freelance workers who do extremely dangerous labor for the equivalent of just a few dollars a day. He says that although the DRC has more cobalt reserves than the rest of the planet combined, there's no such thing as a 'clean' supply chain of cobalt from the country. Chan School of Public Health and at the Kennedy School, has been researching modern-day slavery, human trafficking and child labor for two decades. Smartphones, computers and electric vehicles may be emblems of the modern world, but, says Siddharth Kara, their rechargeable batteries are frequently powered by cobalt mined by workers laboring in slave-like conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo. An artisanal miner carries a sack of ore at the Shabara artisanal mine near Kolwezi, DRC, on Oct.

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