Speaker 1: Sleepwalkers is a production of iHeart Media and Unusual Productions.
Speaker 1: We're in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We're in the
Speaker 1: south of the country, in a region that very famous
Speaker 1: for its copper and cobalt reserves. It's an area of
Speaker 1: beautiful expanses of rolling hills peppered with shrubs and trees.
Speaker 1: The grounders dry and dusty, and there are at lease
Speaker 1: of dust storms that are whipped up from the minds
Speaker 1: that dot the region. That's Nicholas Niakos speaking. He's a
Speaker 1: journalist who recently wrote a piece for The New Yorker
Speaker 1: magazine under the headline the dark Side of Congo's Cobalt Rush.
Speaker 1: I think that often reporters described places as dusty in
Speaker 1: order to give them atmosphere. I try not to do that,
Speaker 1: but you can't really help but notice the dust, because,
Speaker 1: especially in the dry season, nose gets plugged with it,
Speaker 1: and this dust has very very high concentration of heavy
Speaker 1: metals and even radioactive material. I wanted to know what
Speaker 1: took Nicholas to dusty Kolwzy, a city of about half
Speaker 1: a million people in the mineral rich south of the
Speaker 1: Democratic Republic of Congo. I was interested in working on
Speaker 1: cobalts after reading about some of the shenanigans in the
Speaker 1: mining industry, people who have made incredible amounts of money
Speaker 1: in one of the poorest countries of Africa, and that
Speaker 1: really took me to this question of who are the
Speaker 1: people actually doing the mining? And in cool Weazy Nicholas
Speaker 1: met those people, men, women, and in some cases children.
Speaker 1: I met this child called Zicki who worked as a
Speaker 1: child miner. He worked from the age of three in
Speaker 1: some of the minds and he had this terrible experience
Speaker 1: m hmm. Was talking about how he mutually been beaten.
Speaker 1: He was talking about how terrifying going down the minds was,
Speaker 1: and at one point I took out my cell phone.
Speaker 1: I said, listen to a new phone like this in
Speaker 1: the US goes for over a thousand dollars. Then he
Speaker 1: said something like, it really pains me to hear that.
Speaker 1: It really hurts me deep down my soul. Don't made
Speaker 1: him sad. I think he thought that the people buying
Speaker 1: these phones didn't understand the suffering of people like him.
Speaker 1: In this bonus episode, we look at the relationship between
Speaker 1: cobalt lithium ion batteries and the hidden labor upon which
Speaker 1: so much technology that we all live by is built.
Speaker 1: I'm as Veloshin and this is Sleepwalkers. So Carrot's great
Speaker 1: to see you. It's been a long while. Although that
Speaker 1: was a rather bleak and sobering introduction. It definitely was
Speaker 1: a bleak and so we're in introduction. But it's very
Speaker 1: good to be back on Sleepwalkers and to to see
Speaker 1: you after all this time. So this is, on the
Speaker 1: face of it, a bit of an unusual story for us.
Speaker 1: We don't normally cover mining on Sleepwalkers, and yet there's
Speaker 1: this extraordinary story that recently came out in the New
Speaker 1: Yorker Full Disclosure, written by a friend of mine, Nicholas,
Speaker 1: and it's about children mining toxic cobalt in the Democratic
Speaker 1: Republic of Congo, and some of this cobalt reportedly ends
Speaker 1: up in the lithium and batteries that power our tesla's well.
Speaker 1: I don't actually have a Tesla, but I do have
Speaker 1: an Efe. I definitely have an iPhone. I've talked a
Speaker 1: lot about my iPhone addiction here. I've been very open
Speaker 1: and vulnerable about it. Um Actually, to me, this is
Speaker 1: a quintessential Sleepwalker story and that we're looking at multiple
Speaker 1: large technology companies touting progress innovation and even in some cases,
Speaker 1: like with Tesla, efforts to rely on more sustainable technology.
Speaker 1: But there is a dark underbelly that exposes the limits
Speaker 1: of breakneck innovation. But that's sort of the history of innovation. Well,
Speaker 1: it's funny you joked about your iPhone addiction. I mean,
Speaker 1: of course there's a lot of tech coverage. What are
Speaker 1: these things doing to our children? We see very clearly
Speaker 1: from Nick's reporting what these things are doing to other
Speaker 1: people's children. Not everyone's blind to what's going on. According
Speaker 1: to the piece in the New Yorker, is actually a
Speaker 1: lawsuit in Washington right now where some attorneys from the
Speaker 1: International Rights advocates are suing Apple, Google, Dell, Microsoft, and
Speaker 1: Tesla for the deaths and injuries of children. And I
Speaker 1: just want to read to you from the complaint. These
Speaker 1: boys are working under stone age conditions, for paltry wages
Speaker 1: and at immense personal risk to provide cobalt. The hundreds
Speaker 1: of billions of dollars generated by the defendants each year
Speaker 1: would not be possible without cobalt mind in the Democratic
Speaker 1: Republic of Congo. Now, to be clear, this is a complaint,
Speaker 1: not a judgment, but it's absolutely shocking. Absolutely. Our President
Speaker 1: Joe Biden recently signed an executive order aimed at addressing
Speaker 1: supply chain issues for rare earth minerals that the United
Speaker 1: States rely on from other nations. Um. There was actually
Speaker 1: a recent article in the New York Times that said
Speaker 1: that the United States lags far behind other countries in
Speaker 1: manufacturing many clean energy technologies, which leaves US heavily reliant
Speaker 1: on imports. I think the Biden administration is rightfully focused
Speaker 1: on the sort of greeny of America, but I think
Speaker 1: that they are probably less preoccupied with what we are
Speaker 1: now seeing as a standout human rights issue, and that
Speaker 1: that's why I appreciate this article. Nicholas has written, well,
Speaker 1: part of it is the greening of America and the
Speaker 1: other part is competition with China. Right, So there's this
Speaker 1: kind of undertone in the piece of a new great
Speaker 1: game or a competition for scarce resources. And indeed, many
Speaker 1: of the companies that own and operate cobalt mines in
Speaker 1: the DRC are Chinese, but the trick is they sell
Speaker 1: to American companies. So you have this kind of hypocrisy
Speaker 1: where American big tech companies love to kind of hold
Speaker 1: up China as this threat as to the reason they
Speaker 1: can't be regulated because the U s would fall behind.
Speaker 1: And at the same time, they are using the output
Speaker 1: of Chinese companies mining cobalt in the Democratic Republic of
Speaker 1: Congo to power some of the most iconic and profitable
Speaker 1: consumer products that we have in this country, from the
Speaker 1: iPhone to the Tesla. Yeah. I think what's so interesting
Speaker 1: is like, it's not so much about staying competitive with China,
Speaker 1: it's about staying competitive at all. And I think without China,
Speaker 1: American technology companies don't have a shot at being profitable
Speaker 1: in the way that they are now. And I think
Speaker 1: that it is sort of high time that we call
Speaker 1: attention to that when we come back. Nicholas takes us
Speaker 1: deep into cobalt mining in the DRC and explains just
Speaker 1: how the output of the minds there ends up in
Speaker 1: our pockets in the form of our phones. For decades,
Speaker 1: cobalt has been a crucial industrial element, used in everything
Speaker 1: from shipbuilding two airplane engines. In fact, during the Cold War,
Speaker 1: there was a proxy conflict in the DRC between the
Speaker 1: US and the Soviet Union, reportedly fueled in part by
Speaker 1: competition over co boalt, and demand has not slowed down
Speaker 1: far from it. In the last twelve months alone, the
Speaker 1: price of cobalt has doubled, and much of the demand
Speaker 1: is stoked by its use in the manufacturing of lithiumine batteries.
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley has become incredibly wealthy through the production of
Speaker 1: devices like laptops and cell phones which used lithiumine batteries,
Speaker 1: and now electric cars have become part of selicon value.
Speaker 1: Cobalt is essentially a safety feature of lithiumine batteries. It
Speaker 1: allows you to make the batteries smaller and more powerful
Speaker 1: while reducing the risk of them catching fire, and that's
Speaker 1: why it remains crucial to everything from personal electronics to
Speaker 1: electric vehicles. The history of the lithia mine and battery
Speaker 1: is really interesting. It was developed as a response to
Speaker 1: some of the oil crises of the nineteen seventies. Exxon
Speaker 1: was looking for a way to power cars that wasn't
Speaker 1: dependent on oil, so they developed these very sort of
Speaker 1: early type of electric cars, and they had these lithium
Speaker 1: batteries which were liable to overheat and catch fire and
Speaker 1: had to be very big. The three inventors of the
Speaker 1: lithium ion battery actually won the Nobel Prize a couple
Speaker 1: of years ago for their work on creating these batteries,
Speaker 1: and the citations noted just how ubiquitous these batteries are
Speaker 1: and how they power modern life. Silicon Valley has an
Speaker 1: insatiable appetite for cobalt and lithium ion batteries play a
Speaker 1: key role in much of the wonder of modern life.
Speaker 1: But why did it have to be mined in such
Speaker 1: deplorable conditions? So you really need to make a distinction
Speaker 1: between two types of mining. There's artisanal mining, which is
Speaker 1: responsible for about ten to the supply chain, and then
Speaker 1: the rest is industrially mined by large companies. Artisal miners
Speaker 1: are people who come and mine the cobalt in essentially
Speaker 1: stone edge conditions. They use chisels that they sharpen, often
Speaker 1: by hand, and they go down very very deep mind shafts,
Speaker 1: and the shafts that they build are often not reinforced
Speaker 1: properly or in very sandy soil, which leads to the
Speaker 1: shafts collapsing. So this in French is known as an
Speaker 1: eb or a can And there are these terrifying stories
Speaker 1: of Ed Boulmont which kill you up to seventy people
Speaker 1: working in these very very deep shafts. So to be clear,
Speaker 1: the majority of cobalt mining does take place in industrial minds,
Speaker 1: which have much better safety conditions than the so called
Speaker 1: artisanal or unofficial minds. According to Nicholas, it's in these
Speaker 1: artisanal minds that child labor is most prevalent. I spoke
Speaker 1: to children who said to me that they've been working
Speaker 1: as young as three, and I really didn't believe this,
Speaker 1: and a Catholic charity that works with the children actually
Speaker 1: confirmed that the very youngest children sought through the rejected
Speaker 1: pile of material that larger mining companies will cast off
Speaker 1: to pick out the high quality cobalt from the lower
Speaker 1: quality or The obvious question is just how much of
Speaker 1: the cobalt that's mind or sorted by children ends up
Speaker 1: in products that many of us use every day. It's
Speaker 1: very difficult to know what makes its way to big
Speaker 1: companies like Apple. There are still large companies that buy
Speaker 1: from artisanal sources, and that seems to filter into the
Speaker 1: supply chain and often through smelters and sort of mixing
Speaker 1: up of products. It will end up in people's phones
Speaker 1: and potentially in people's car batteries. And while companies like
Speaker 1: Apple have made efforts to stop that happening, there's still
Speaker 1: a lot of evidence to suggest that children are mining cobalt.
Speaker 1: I went to a mind called Cassulo, which is directly
Speaker 1: in Apple supply chain, and that mine, I have to say,
Speaker 1: they had erected a wall and they were trying to
Speaker 1: keep children out. However, I spoke to some miners and
Speaker 1: they said that children still make an effort to get in,
Speaker 1: and still do get in, and still do manage to
Speaker 1: mind cobalt. There So the question you have to ask
Speaker 1: yourself is why are the children mining? A big part
Speaker 1: of the answer is clearly that the political will doesn't
Speaker 1: exist to stop children from mining cobalt. The brutal backdrop
Speaker 1: to all of this is the cobalt itself is a
Speaker 1: byproduct of copper mining, which was a key activity of
Speaker 1: the Belgian colonialists in Congo. This country has now been
Speaker 1: exploited for centuries with very little concern for the welfare
Speaker 1: of the local population. As Nicholas explains, the so called
Speaker 1: great game continues to this day. I think China is
Speaker 1: key to this story. The Chinese attitude has been to
Speaker 1: buy up as much of the cobalt supply as possible,
Speaker 1: and according to Nicholas, the Chinese presence in and around
Speaker 1: Calway is palpable. The moment you step foot off the
Speaker 1: plane so you arrive in the airport is oppressively hot.
Speaker 1: You are jostled around. If you don't have a fixer
Speaker 1: lined up at the airport, you're pushed to the back
Speaker 1: of a customs line as everybody everybody else's shuttled in
Speaker 1: front of you. There are at least a hundred of
Speaker 1: people shouting in Mandarin at Congolese officials who don't understand them,
Speaker 1: who are shouting back in French and Swahili. The airport
Speaker 1: is a pretty intense experience. One consequent of the effective
Speaker 1: Chinese ownership of cobalt mining has been to obscure the
Speaker 1: supply chain. In some cases, even when intentioned US companies
Speaker 1: simply cannot verify the source of the cobalt they're buying.
Speaker 1: But as Nicholas explains, there is another more directly threatening
Speaker 1: potential consequence. So this is something that I think that
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley needs to look at very very carefully, because
Speaker 1: they believe that they will always be able to bind
Speaker 1: batteries from China. But if China suddenly banned the export
Speaker 1: of Lathian iron batteries in order to favor its own companies,
Speaker 1: then Silicon Valley would be left without a source of
Speaker 1: power for their devices, and China would be allowed to
Speaker 1: dominate in terms of production of technological apparatus. And that
Speaker 1: is very scary to people who are concerned about human
Speaker 1: rights and government interference, because the Chinese government doesn't have
Speaker 1: a great record of a allowing people privacy on their devices.
Speaker 1: As so often a situation that today appears to be
Speaker 1: somebody else's problem, maybe our own problem tomorrow. But Nicholas
Speaker 1: told me he went to Kolwayzy because he wanted to
Speaker 1: better understand the lives of cobalt miners, and it is
Speaker 1: their fate that centralled his reporting. So there had been
Speaker 1: this terrible cave in when a group of artisanal miners
Speaker 1: more than forty but perhaps many many more people died.
Speaker 1: And so somebody mentioned that they knew one of the
Speaker 1: widows of these miners, and I was taken to see
Speaker 1: her along a dirt road, and you arrive in this
Speaker 1: town of one two room shacks, bran Juan, and I
Speaker 1: was taken to the backyard, and I sat there interviewing
Speaker 1: this woman who was telling me about her husband who
Speaker 1: died and what an amazing man he'd been, and you know,
Speaker 1: how he'd supported that their family, and how his profession
Speaker 1: was to be an artisanal minor. And then I looked
Speaker 1: behind me and I noticed that there were some sort
Speaker 1: of shallow troughs in the ground behind her house. And
Speaker 1: I said, what are these holes in the ground and
Speaker 1: she said, and we were digging recently, myself and my sons,
Speaker 1: in order to look for minerals. And we took a
Speaker 1: little walk around that area, and everybody in their backyard
Speaker 1: had been digging to look for copper and gulbalt. And
Speaker 1: I think that really sums it up for me. I
Speaker 1: asked her, I said, you've seen how dangerous this activity is.
Speaker 1: She explained it to me in this way, which was
Speaker 1: that they just don't have anything to live on. They
Speaker 1: need to survive, and this is the only way that
Speaker 1: they can survive. They need to have some sort of
Speaker 1: economic activity to get by, and there's absolutely no other
Speaker 1: work to be done there. And that I think is
Speaker 1: the crux of this entire story, is that this kind
Speaker 1: of gray rock street with blue that's pulled out of
Speaker 1: the ground in a part of the world that's very
Speaker 1: far away from the rest of us, is sort of
Speaker 1: transformed by a modern alchemy into this gadget with lots
Speaker 1: of bells and whistles, And in the meantime, the people
Speaker 1: who have originally dug up the gray rock are left
Speaker 1: with very, very little when we come back. Nicholas talks
Speaker 1: about the response to his reporting from some of the
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley companies who rely on cobalt, and about the
Speaker 1: status of the lawsuit against those companies. Throughout Sleepwalkers, it's
Speaker 1: become clear that Silicon Valley often prefers not to think
Speaker 1: about the human collateral of innovation, whether it's the uncompensated
Speaker 1: translates whose work powers AHI translation, or the victims of
Speaker 1: over zealous risk assessment algorithms. So I was curious to
Speaker 1: hear from Nicholas how companies like Apple and Tesla had
Speaker 1: responded to his reporting. I tried to speak to some
Speaker 1: of the tech companies that were involved in this, and
Speaker 1: they refused to speak to me on the record. Again,
Speaker 1: I do think that Apple is trying to address these issues.
Speaker 1: Do you think Tesla is trying to address these issues.
Speaker 1: They've joined groups like the Fair Cobalt Alliance, which have
Speaker 1: tried to improve conditions in some of the minds and
Speaker 1: have tried to clean up the supply chain and remove
Speaker 1: child mind cobalts from the supply chain. But yeah, they're
Speaker 1: not very good about speaking about it publicly, and that's problematic.
Speaker 1: I asked if there was anything beyond the obvious pr
Speaker 1: and commercial imperatives that was driving Silicon Valley to continue
Speaker 1: sweeping cobalt mining out of the carpet. This issue of
Speaker 1: supply eye chains is something that a lot of pure
Speaker 1: tech people probably don't want to think about because they
Speaker 1: are involved in solving problems of a different type. But
Speaker 1: without thinking about the raw fundaments of what goes into
Speaker 1: powering that technology and creating that technology, I don't think
Speaker 1: that we can properly feel unconflicted about all the benefits
Speaker 1: that computers and electric cars and so on bring to
Speaker 1: our lives in the nearer term. I wanted to know
Speaker 1: about the status of the lawsuit being brought by international
Speaker 1: rights advocates and what it might achieve. This lawsuit is
Speaker 1: very important, and I think that if it gets to
Speaker 1: the point of discovery, I think that we will learn
Speaker 1: a lot about how Silicon Valley thinks about their supply chain. Currently,
Speaker 1: the defendants of Father to dismiss the lawsuit and we'll
Speaker 1: see how that goes. But I do think that it's
Speaker 1: an important lawsuit and that through it we may be
Speaker 1: able to learn a great deal more about this quite
Speaker 1: obscure industry. It is the magic of the product form
Speaker 1: to disguise its own ingredients. And there's no doubt that
Speaker 1: between personal computers, cell phones, and electric vehicles, the Lithia
Speaker 1: Mind battery has enabled tremendous good in the world. The
Speaker 1: batteries inventors, after all, one a Nobel Prize for their research,
Speaker 1: which quote laid the foundation of a wireless, fossil fuel
Speaker 1: free society. But as the human stories of cobalt mining
Speaker 1: remind us, that innovation comes with the price. I want
Speaker 1: people to understand how their choices matter, and I think
Speaker 1: that there's a tendency to look at devices as disposable.
Speaker 1: And I think on a very basic level, if you're
Speaker 1: thinking about just throwing away your phone or buying a
Speaker 1: new laptop or something like that, just just think about
Speaker 1: where that's coming from. This will will become a political
Speaker 1: issue at some point and if there are ballot measures
Speaker 1: or politicians who stand on these issues. I think it's
Speaker 1: important for people to understand the history of this material
Speaker 1: and how political change can affect this very brutal cycle.
Speaker 1: Sleepwalkers is hosted by me osvil Noshin and Carrot Price.
Speaker 1: It's executive produced by me and Julian Weller is the
Speaker 1: senior producer, and this episode was produced by Ryan Kayloth.