The cobalt challenge - The dark side of the energy transition | DW Documentary

Well, imagine that thousands of people in the DRC or DRC are supplying raw materials for a global revolution. What they are mining here is in high demand all over the world. Cobalt industrial countries urgently need the metal to make batteries the heart of all electrical appliances. vehicles in the race to stop climate change Cobalt has become key to the

transition

from fossil fuels. Who is paying the price? carmakers are entering a new era VW Renault BMW Volvo all the big names are adapting their fleets to electric vehicles Environmental concerns are driving Transitioning consumer and internal combustion commercial vehicles produce about a quarter of all emissions of greenhouse gases in Europe.

Volkswagen invested 1.2 billion euros in this site, which is especially dedicated to the six large automobiles that we began to manufacture here. Everything adapted and now we are 100. electric we manufacture 100 electric cars here electricity from 2035 the EU intends to ban the sale of new cars with internal combustion engines the far-reaching decision affects the entire production chain if we want reaching climate neutrality in 30 years we need With all the technologies available, we are now the undisputed number one when it comes to investment in the battery sector, so we are a very hot zone for battery investment, which which means we currently have 70 ongoing projects and we are over 120 billion years old. investment in the last three years, which is three and a half times more than the money invested in China in the same sector and that we are going to create many fair jobs and, as I said, a completely new industry, most of the batteries electric cars in Europe are based on nickel manganese

cobalt

or nmc technology which allows them to travel around 400 kilometers after one charge, the batteries contain lithium and around 10 kilograms of

cobalt

if we look at the average high capacity battery cell, the type used in Tesla or Volkswagen.

ID3, most of it is nickel. Nickel is what gives the battery its extremely high range. Cobalt is effectively the safety mechanism, so you put a little bit of cobalt in the battery and that means you won't have battery fires and your cells will remain stable. Under extreme pressure, the vast majority of cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and that is essentially because there is no other place in the world that has the same grades or mineralogy of cobalt as the Congo; actually, there is no other country in the world that can claim to have the same quality of deposits, quality of reserves, um, it's almost as if the Saudi Arabia of Congo cobalt has been blessed or cursed, depending on how you look at it, with extraordinary Geological mineral wealth has always been strategic, whether it was in rubber in the 19th century or in uranium in the mid-20th century or more recently in the issue of critical strategic minerals for the agenda that the international community has adopted.

The consensus that we need to move towards carbon neutrality. Emissions in the world require electricity. vehicles requires renewable

energy

, all of which requires strategic minerals coming from the Congo, firstly you could say it could be cobalt Cole Waze is the cobalt capital of the world, we are here in the heart of the copper belt, an industrial region Located in the southern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and neighboring Zambia. A century of mining has shaped the landscape. The largest reserves of copper and cobalt are located in the provinces of Lualaba and Upper Katanga. Foreign corporations are exploiting this immense world of the 19 copper and cobalt mines in the region. 15 are owned by Chinese, they share the business with the Swiss group Glencore, which operates two of the most productive minds in the world, and with Eurasian Resources Group.

Cobalt is normally transported by truck to South Africa, loaded onto ships in Durban and then shipped from Durban. to China, where it is processed into battery chemicals and from there it ends up in the broader supply chain. Right now, global cobalt demand is in the region of 140,000 tonnes, 150 maybe um, but we expect that to increase to 250 in the next five. years, it is known that a lot of new demand is going to reach the market and we are going to need to find supply for it. A ton of cobalt can sell for more than US$70,000 on the world market. which often occurs along

side

copper has encouraged mining corporations since the battery market exploded 10 years ago are making more and more profits while re

side

nts of mining regions live on less than two dollars a day the populations that They live in the area around the mountains.

It seems that there are no schools, hospitals or streets. The people do not have access to drinking water. Even those who have water cannot drink it because the natural water courses that were in some of the towns are already contaminated with acid. have been Poisoned mining tends to make people even poorer instead of improving living conditions. He is a lawyer and human rights activist. He is researching the impact of the booming battery market on the local population. The last one is just less facilities. The consequences are already evident in the facilities. from the Chinese Congolese companies do you see those trucks that dump waste, that is what I call overloading or killing of the main mountains that have accumulated where there was none five years ago, during the dry season, the dust falls onto the fields here there is a thick layer of dust on the plants around us, that's why people hardly grow anything here because of the dust that comes from the tailings piles there because of the dust, but also because of the quality of the water in the river in front of us, the water in their basins overflows and the acid it contains ruins their fields.

How old is the maniac here? three years three years there is almost nothing, could you dig a route and sell them in the markets to get money? buy food they knew about this problem yes, to begin with they supplied us with drinking water but that's over maybe they thought it's not so bad if they die they should come and see how we live here that applies to the government we are also citizens you know me, I come here regularly you say our work is not progressive since we took on your case when your representatives come to kawasi they see that we are putting pressure on foreign authorities stay in touch with your community leader goodbye when a mine opens people lose their farmland Villages are poisoned and residents have to abandon their traditional way of life.

No one goes to the mountains to collect caterpillars and insects because there are no more fish there. You want fish in the river because there are no more fish. When the water flows through the mining area, it has to. be a clear policy. Guidance: Major operators provide compensation for consequences like this, but as I said, the Congolese government stays completely out of it and mining companies and cobalt end users are ignoring the problem, the industrial mines of Lualaba and Alto Katanga produces 80 of Congolese cobalt, the remaining 20 come from artisanal mining under orange tarps. Prospectors work in wells far below the surface.

The city of Bila is one of them and is also one of the 150,000 people who come from all over the country driven by poverty hope to get a piece of the pie CE life in Kinshasa was hard I lost my job I was fired my family said that You can't go on like this without a job I couldn't pay the rent, there is cobalt there and you can make a living, so I came here and became a cobalt digger. I had never done it before abroad, this is mining with your hands, you go down the well, you break the stone with a crowbar and fill the bags then the transporters go down and take out the bags then we have done our job the transporters take it out by taking out a bag after bag to the surface the women then wash the ore in the lake we pay the women and the transporters and we sell the ore in the warehouse I am scared to death the first time I went down I started to shake everyone else they laughed they laughed at me because I was shaking a lot I was shaking with fear but there was no turning back I am After all, I am a man.

I must go there regardless of whether I was afraid. Many cobalt prospectors die in landslides or drown when water floods the mine, but thousands of families depend on what little the government and industry allow them to mine here from their own land. thank you, the government has been trying to regulate the artisanal mining sector for 20 years, the law says that those involved must join a cooperative, but in reality the structures are very hierarchical, simple workers have no participation or voice in their operations, artisanal mining is really important to track because it is probably the only source of swing supply in the cobalt market.

It is the only source of cobalt. The offer may go up or down depending on prices. The vast majority of cobalt mined today is a byproduct of copper or a byproduct of nickel and if you own a huge copper and cobalt mine, for example, the vast majority of your money is made from copper, so If the price of cobalt suddenly skyrockets, you won't increase your production rate because you only care. As for copper, it's great that the price of cobalt is going up and it increases the value of cobalt, but you're not going to increase supply to meet that additional demand, you can't because it's a byproduct, um, the only exception to that more or less.

It is artisanal mining that is the real cobalt. That is the yield of my mine shaft. We extract 350 bags in a full day of work. 350. Yes, if the scale is calibrated correctly, a bag weighs 20 kilos. The Chinese manipulate their scales to deceive us, so it turns out to be just 10, but usually it's 20, and then the measuring device may not work, so they give you a different cobalt content for the same product. I know, but we are forced to deal with the Chinese, who they cheat when it comes to cobalt. content of the mineral but we have to sell it to them they come here and serve themselves they exploit us and leave we work hard and we don't learn anything what happens The cobalt mine is mainly sold everything to Chinese businessmen who are entering the Congo after an initial processing stage They export the medium to foreign foundries foreign my question I hit the rock until it breaks and then I look inside if there are traces of black.

I know it has cobalt, maybe that will end up on a smartphone e Carl, thanks, this was My first trip to Nkowazi, you know, what caught my attention the most was how the whole town was built around the mining industry around and on top of it of these minerals and this very, very, very strong feeling that these people, the people who live there, should benefit. This extraordinary wealth that is creating prosperity for Chinese companies, European companies, American companies, but they are suffering, they are not the ones benefiting from this. You know, this hit particularly hard in some parts of the city where houses are being demolished to make way. for the expansion of industrial minds um, it reaches the parts of the city where people are digging in the basements of their houses or underground to access cobalt or copper.

It is an extremely dysfunctional amnesty. The internationals had a program on corporate responsibility and role. that companies have been involved in human rights abuses around the world for about 15 years and we have done previous projects in the Democratic Republic of the Congo looking at the mining industry, but mainly focused on the great industrial minds. This revealed to me that doing some basic research on this, you know, and it's obviously not a secret to anyone in the DRC, but the artisanal mining sector was getting bigger and bigger, particularly when it came to the cruise ship. Cobalt, the diggers were risking their lives and health. to extract this metal they were also probably not receiving a fair price for their work they were being financially exploited we discovered that children as young as seven or eight also participated in this in this industry no family wants their children to work no child no child of seven years old wants to spend all day entering you know illegally entering the compound and spending all day picking up rocks from the ground with the risk of being hit or robbed nobody wants to do what they are doing that because they are forced by circumstances, this is how eat that day, that's how they can pay, you know, a small amount for school fees, man, the main findings of the report were that up to 20 percent of the world's cobalt came from autism mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

We wanted to know where this cobalt was going, who was buying it, what companies, what technology companies, you know, cell phone and laptop manufacturers were using this cobalt in their batteries and what they were doing.to understand this supply chain and understand these conditions, the response we got to this report by drawing the links to you know of you know, look at child labor, artisanal mining, the cobalt industry that links these Minds with these famous brands had a massive media uptake much more than we expected that no company automaker or other Cobble consumer would want to be labeled as a beneficiary of child labor.

It's terrible advertising, it hurts. Shared value if it's wrong and consumers don't like it, so it's bad even for business. If you are ethically stunted and don't care about others if you are just selfish, you should still be against it because it is bad for business. I remember when the world really started to pay attention to artisanal mining it was in 2016 with the publication of the amnesty reports um and we had clients contacting us and saying we want cobalts that are not from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we do not want to get our cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Child labor is not the only problem for automakers. The

transition

to electric vehicles or EVS has made them aware of how dependent they are on Congolese cobalt and batteries that are mainly manufactured in Asia. That is why the EU approved a major battery development project in 2017. If you want to ensure that Europe also produces the best cars in the future, but this time also the most sustainable ones, you cannot do it by simply importing the battery from somewhere else without that traceability. without respecting all the standards without making sure that the carbon footprint is as low as possible and therefore we started with the European Battery Alliance and therefore we are doing this.

I would say it's great to catch up with China, so it was a bit of a late start. because in the automobile industry we not simply perceived three four years ago that electromobility would arrive so soon, but now it is a totally different story; In reality, this is not only good for Europe and for tackling climate change, but there are very clear benefits for local communities in the form of new jobs, new investment possibilities and a clear commitment that everything must be done in a 100 sustainable way. Only 10 of the world's batteries are produced in Europe to gain ground by 2035, around which the EU wants to build. 30 gigafactories and alone produce a quarter of the world's supply Several hectares of forest have already been sacrificed for the new industry in Sweden the Swedish company Northvolt has built the first huge battery factory in Europe, taking on Asian manufacturers Norfolk was founded almost five years ago Years ago, Peter Carlson, the Swede, and Paulo, the Italian, found themselves working for Tesla as Europeans.

Both are obviously starting to look towards Europe, which is a part of the world where around 20 million vehicles are produced each year. Every year we have between 13 and 14 million people working in this industry and if you believe in the hypothesis that all these cars that we produce will become electric, not having batteries produced at scale will always be something critical for Europe and that was a kind of The premise of the Norfolk idea came about, so they returned to Europe and founded Northville in late 2016. As a company, bringing in over $6.5 billion in investments, we have been fortunate to have many of the well-established automakers who came on board at an early stage, BMW was perhaps the first in 2018.

Volkswagen is a big customer and investor in the North West and more recently we announced a joint venture together with Volvo, of course our goal was to build another one of these gigafactories to have independent raw materials for new battery factories. Europe is operating a number of mining projects. Cobalt reserves have been identified in Sweden, Norway and Finland. There are currently two nickel-cobalt mines operating there and seven more are being developed. Finland has dozens of critical mineral deposits and has opened large areas to mining. We have just begun the process of mental development in Kusama. That area has been thoroughly investigated by a former state company and then another company since the early '90s, so there is a lot of material that has been drilled in that area and we have done some drilling as well.

It's promising right now, the current deficit would be a good profitable mind. The International Energy Association estimates that we need about 20 times more cobalt for the world market than we have now. Finland cannot And we will not provide that we all can provide part of that part, but it is very important that, for example, a car manufacturer has possibilities. Traceability will be Europe's answer to Chinese-dominated Chinese production, which comes to Cobalt Finland. is the only EU member that has deposits of all the minerals necessary for batteries 300 kilometers from the Arctic Circle the company Terra Farmer has reactivated the sotkamu mine that was closed in 2012 after toxins leaked into the canals and surrounding lakes.

Terra Farmer is managed by the Finnish government and Trafigura, a commodities trading company that has been convicted of environmental crimes in Africa, the facility supplies nickel to Renault for its EVs. Many people in Europe have an absolutely wrong view about mining activities that people still see, I mean miners with headlights and And the type of physical work is risky work, but of course modern mining is this is not the picture. What we produce here at Terraforme is the battery chemicals, so it's nickel sulfate and cobalt sulfate, uh, that we produce from the raw materials that we mine. ourselves, so we have biolating mining and then we produce more battery chemicals.

If you look at cobalt, the production capacity is 7,400 tonnes of battery copper sulphate again for battery applications and that is approximately for 300,000 electric vehicles per year according to the contract with Renault. So it covers almost a third of our production capacity, but the main thing from our perspective is that now, together with Renault, we are building a supply chain that spans from mining activities to battery chemicals, cathode materials , battery cells and automobiles. The manufacturing is sustainable and of course being in the European Union we have a lot of focus data on environmental mothers taking proper care of human rights, labor rights are in good shape according to the EU. commission by 2030 there should be at least 30 million electric vehicles on European roads, but to achieve this goal 10 Terra Pharma factories would be needed to supply only cobalt.

I think the rise and exploration in Europe is certainly a reflection of the higher prices we have. Now they are going to run into problems with the quality of the reserves. You know, I've seen mining projects that have boasted about having .08 cobalt there or graded in the Congo. Some cobalt reserves may be that high. high like three or four percent cobalt, you know from artisanal sources, certainly in the Congo, some artisanal mine sites with a high cobalt content that you can lift a rock and it has a slight blue-green tint and you can say that It contains like cobalt 10, you won't get that anywhere in Europe, with its high operating costs and low yields.

Europe will never be a Cobalt El Dorado, but it could score big in another key recycling sector within a decade. 10 of all the cobalt in the world could be recycled. The Belgian company umicor is a leader in this market and says that in the future it will be able to recycle almost one hundred percent of the cobalt in batteries. We started with battery recycling with mobile phone battery recycling, but knowing that electric vehicles It will only be a matter of time because, in fact, circularity complements the complementarity of mining, on the one hand, which is still needed today in day, but it would be a waste not to recycle products like cobalt and be less dependent on mining, for example, yes, it will be recycled.

It is a huge market, very important to investigate for battery metals because, because they are infinitely recyclable, it becomes a great source of supply within your demand. It bifurcates within your supply forecast, especially in the long term, when we build 10-year to 20-year forecasts. For cobalt, nickel and lithium it becomes extremely important to understand the circularity of those supply chains, firstly because it is obviously a large amount of material that will return to the supply chain, but secondly because it changes the origin of the supply from 2035. The batteries of all electric vehicles sold in the EU must contain at least 20 recycled cobalt.

Volkswagen is already operating a recycling facility. The future European vehicle battery production giants in France and Northvolt in Sweden have already taken this into account in their gigafactories. The raw materials we need for battery metals are recyclable in nature and you can recycle them over and over again, so it's really about extracting them once and then using them forever, and that's the fundamental difference in this change here and obviously given the speed at which we're growing this market currently, it's going to take a few decades, it's going to take a while to get to a point where you have an established market, you know, a car in one type of market, but once you get there There, obviously, there could be a very circular field of raw materials, so in 10 years, for example, the first generation of electric vehicles in Europe will come off the roads and everyone will start scrapping them and buying new vehicles with cobalt, those batteries will be recycled. in Europe and will be incorporated into the European supply chain, meaning that over time, due to that recycling, the Loop countries and regions will have a reduced dependence on African minerals after the 2016 amnesty report, the mining industry she was forced to make her supply. more transparent chains that in 2019 the oecd brought together the most important companies in a forum at coalwayze the objective was to support them in the monitoring of Cobalt how the magic words due diligence thanks we represent the largest companies in the world that have a common vision of guaranteeing that the supply of minerals and metals is responsible and contributes positively to social and economic development worldwide.

Due diligence is a process by which companies are supposed to map their supply chains or other business relationships and operations and identify how those business relationships or supply chains could be linked to human rights abuses and whether that means getting to the point of extraction, so so be it and the fact that we and others have exposed a range of human rights abuses in minds means that they should absolutely go back and map and understand that risk due diligence also It involves mitigating those risks, so it is not just a matter of understanding what is happening but also mitigating them because it is a means to an end and the end is to prevent the human rights abuses that it manufactures, commissioned service provider RCS Global to discover the conditions under which its cobalt was mined the company monitors industrial minds and is trying to integrate artisanal minds into due diligence programs for decades there have been many conversations about how to improve autism mining not much In fact, it is has achieved in that sense at this moment, in reality, child labor is not the only risk, as I said, the most frequent risk in ASM sites, so in artisanal and small-scale mining sites, by far , are the working conditions at the time when we had eight Cobalts.

ASM sites aiming to scale to 12 by the end of next year. You are absolutely right in saying that not every year Tesla and the small scale mentality, of course, in the Congo, the reason for this is that there are around around 2 million miners and Sizzlers in the country, if I look at the program general in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, there are about 33,000 miners that are actually under monitoring of uh, you know, the best mining program if you take all the miners from all the different mines. sites under consideration, you drive incremental improvement. You cannot in any way improve each site at the same speed and at the same time.

One of the mines audited by RCS Global has met all due diligence criteria. The pilot mine in Casulo, a district of Kolwezi in In 2014, a resident discovered a cobalt vein that had already attracted about 15,000 prospectors to ensure the district did not collapse and keep children at bay. The provincial government expropriated the property and then transferred operation of the mine to Hawaii Cobalt, which relocated the residents as part of theagreement the Chinese company depends on artisanal mining cooperatives to extract the metal why it then buys what is produced and has commissioned RCS Global to do its due diligence it is good for the company's image the company had been attacked by Amnesty International for selling cobalt mind using child labor now The prospectors no longer risk their lives, however they are still at the mercy of the Chinese who set the price of what they buy.

How much does it cost to clean a well like this? 350,000 to 400,000 Congolese francs build a wooden scaffold to reinforce the walls, that costs about 200,000 francs and we pay for the tarps and everything else, we need three scaffolds in total, it's 500,000 francs to support the well how much do you earn the cooperative? It doesn't cover anything at all the Cooperative doesn't care about us so how much do you have left then just enough to pay for the cassava flower to get to the mine and the laundry soap so we look clean you can't say this is a good job It offers no future unless you spend nothing on what we are supposed to live on.

Companies like RCS Global have enormous power in the new due diligence services market, but given the ever-changing craft minds and complex supply chains, How can it be guaranteed? genuine traceback, as I already said, Volkswagen is not currently purchasing cobalt, but rather we source the material through the supply chain of our cell suppliers, where we work together with an independent service provider to identify its source. We use audits and mapping audits that can follow the supply chain to the Congo and currently we can only audit once a year, so we are never 100% sure if, for example, material from artisanal mining ends up in our chain. of supply, if We found that we acted immediately and demanded that the supplier no longer accept these sources when we purchased our battery cells.

We are dealing with a very opaque supply chain. The steps are far removed from direct mining and the intermediate partner links are often in China. When we don't really know how suppliers trade with each other, we also have to imagine that a supply chain is not something static, companies change, so do suppliers and subcontractors.suppliers, which is desirable for us to get the best price, so it's relatively non-transparent because there are so many partners in the supply chain and it's constantly changing, which keeps things in the

dark

. China is essentially a black box in many ways in that you can see the raw materials coming into China and you can track what leaves China, but actually understanding the framework of who buys and sells what is inside China is extremely challenging, that's especially true for cobalt too because you could have a very, very good quality industrial cobalts, that are genuine and not artisanal, but if they are sold to a refinery in China that also buys other sources of cobalt, it is very difficult to separate all of them. those that must be separated if so.

If you've signed an agreement with a Chinese refinery, you basically have to trust that they will keep those streams separate, and that's a very difficult thing to do, there are different ways that, um, the downstream. Companies try to avoid their responsibility, one of them is to hire expensive consultants. Consultants who basically do the due diligence themselves do the reporting and that keeps them almost at arm's length from the company itself. The other thing companies do is join industry schemes. So they join all the other companies in their sector and create a body that does due diligence for them or promotes a set of standards that everyone signs on to and then it's just a paper exercise and everyone can say yes.

We agree to these standards, we have signed these standards, but that does not necessarily lead to the change that we want to see on the ground and that is why there is a role for organizations like Amnesty International, but particularly a role for organizations like donors. We are in Colwayze because the voices and experience of you, lawyers, activists, scientists, community members and miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are needed, to understand what is happening and to expose what is happening, because we have to see that change. It's no use just knowing that a fancy report on a website is still about child labor and it's no wonder there are still thousands of children working in the small mines of Louisburg, but many NGOs say that, as a result, the other problems they don't can be resolved with due diligence, as forced resettlement without adequate compensation, environmental pollution and corruption are relegated to the background.

Big car manufacturers are very secretive when it comes to this topic. For example, the OECD has organized forums on this very topic. responsible mineral procurement there is no roundtable on corruption can you find an auto industry representative willing to sit next to me and explain his industry point of view? This topic is practically taboo because everyone knows that the problem affects a large part of the cobalt industry. supply chain uh the plundering of congolese natural resources is nothing new more than 60 years ago the belgian colonial rulers enriched themselves from the resources of the congo after independence was declared in 1960 a new type of plunder began dictator mobutus cesico and his friends siphoned billions in profits from the state-owned mining company Jacquamin in 1997.

Laurel Desiree Kabila seized power and war broke out after Kabila was assassinated in 2001. Her son Joseph became president. She restored peace and stimulated the mining sector to fill the government coffers, but Jacob Mean was bankrupt and eh. In 2002 it turned out that he was as bankrupt as the Congolese government and not just economically. The World Bank imposed reforms on the government. They said yes, you have the minerals but not the resources to make the sector reliable. Open your country to working multinational corporations. Good for us because the Congolese government already had its hands in the mining business and they are also among the multinationals that came to the Congo, all the big ones came but not to give the people a future, they all came to me to understand cobalt.

First you have to look at how the companies that are active today in the Congo first obtained mining licenses, especially cobalt licenses, a key figure appears, an Israeli businessman named Dan Gerkler, he played a kind of mediator role between the multinationals who were interested. in copper and cobalt licenses and Congolese politicians who could make decisions about who got the licenses, in many cases this happened, a multinational corporation, be it the Swiss group Glencore or the Kazakhura research group, wanted to obtain a license that once It belonged to the state. company, but instead of selling the license directly to the corporation or holding a bidding round to find the best investor, he did something called direct contract awarding, sold the license at a very low price, and had good connections with the former president.

Joseph Alex president after coming to power in 2001 Joseph Kabila befriended Dan Gertler Curtler was bringing new money to the Congo at a time when the country urgently needed investment he opened a path for Western companies to enter the country in 2007 the former leader world in commodities Glencore received the best prospecting licenses in the country through Gerta Both became co-shareholders in Mutanda Mining one of the largest cobalt mines in the world Glencore then loaned Goodler millions after he negotiated another mining deal with The Congo when this transaction became public, Israel arrived on the radar of the American authorities who suspected that Gatler had bribed the Kabila regime in connection with various projects, sometimes even with the participation of an American investment fund.

It is estimated that the Congolese government lost over US$1 billion during the course of these deals. Things got uncomfortable for Gertler and as a result of this he was subjected to sanctions and other actors were also placed, certain senior officials of the Kabila regime and others as well, but certainly he is the biggest pie, he was the biggest target. in terms of value. of assets controlled by the US that also wanted to invest in the Congo filed lawsuits against Dan Getler and Glencore Great Britain and Switzerland are also investigating the company in 2022 the Swiss multinational announced that it had set aside $1.5 billion for legal disputes .

Industry groups like Yumikor in Belgium, which sources Cobalt from Glencore, take the view that if there is a conviction, we would need to evaluate what is happening and we will also do our own evaluation, if a judge determines that the party is guilty, we will investigate it and then make our decision Of course, yes, based on the legal outcome, that's pretty disappointing to me. Imagine that you have a company buying everything that is extracted using child labor and no one bothers because the company has not been convicted. for doing so when it comes to child labor you would never hear the argument no conviction no problem but it is different with corruption as long as no one is convicted it is fine, we are clear that corruption is not a victimless crime and very often that is As As described, it is money that passes hands between middlemen and corrupt elite officials, but of course at the end of that chain there are often ordinary citizens who suffer quite dramatically as a result of corruption, and corruption in around the metallic coal mine was no exception.

Coal only runs on kilometer-long piles of mine tailings that were deposited in Kolwezi during the Belgian colonial period. Today the site has some of the richest yields in the Copperbelt. In the early 2000s, the first Canadian company Quantum received prospecting rights. It was the agreement of During the century, the tailings still contained 300,000 tons of cobalt worth 20 billion US dollars and suddenly the Kabila regime pulled the plug on the first Quantum and withdrew its license. We now know from documents and court records what happened and what happened is that the mining license had been stripped thanks to the help of a company owned by Dan Gertler, who saw this as a very profitable mine.

He held it for a short period of time and then passed it on to a large multinational mining company, then called Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation today. It's called Eurasian Resources Group or ERG and that company owns the mine today, but we know through court records that it was a mind that was corrupted by Dan Gertner who bribed Congolese officials, including Congolese judges, to get the mining permit. At that time several hundred workers were employed. With the new processing plant being built in Carlwayze and all these people suddenly losing their jobs, the Kazakh company Eurasian Resources Group completed the facility that has since become known as RTR metallic coal, despite all claims to the contrary, the first 700 Quantum workers who were laid off were neither compensated nor rehired yes, the shiny things wow wow yes a desert where metallic coal works Works back there pretty far away yeah behind the smoke back there that's where metallic coal started the recovery then It went as far as here, as a foreigner, I hope that with our participation we can raise awareness among the parties about the real problems of copper and cobalt mining, not just the issue of child labor.

I'm not saying that child labor is not a problem, but it is not the biggest problem in the sector. What is expected from A Specter that the case be resolved so that Justice can be paid to us, but what do you expect from the hearings? Then I will receive my compensation instead of paying it all at once, they paid 600 francs in installments, the normal thing is 600,000 francs for being fired. our money to pay for the kids' school and to pay for the doctor now I can't afford to get sick anymore it's bad I was even able to pay the church tax with my salary how can I find a new job without a blessing they just fired ? the contracts without any compensation as if we did not exist no, they don't care about us we expect a lot from this case we will endure until the end the company has to admit its mistake and compensate us I know that they are getting rich with what they are producing there so don't kill the shoes and we who built the factory are poor that is unfair it is as if you work a field together with your children and then when harvest time comes you go and look for the neighbors' children, that is what is happening here and we still had job, we had access to healthcare, we made enough to send our kids to school, then I got laid off and my daughter got seriously ill, yeah, I did everything I could to see that through. she was treated at the hospital they turned me away she died on the way home hello my son died a year later that is my daughter her name wasyes she had malaria and that's him what was his name wait what happened he had malaria and yellow fever he also died he was eight years old welcome to radio television Monica today we are talking about ecosystems what are the consequences of mining for the local population today our guest is Professor Bonza a toxicologist and professor at the University of Lubumbashi Professor what were you doing here At Coldway we first evaluate the level of contamination of the ecosystems that are relevant to the population how contaminated are the waterways how contaminated are the fish what they eat after that we look at the Health of the People we wanted to see how much they have been affected by eating fish breathing the dust and by the general pollution of their environment has been researching the ecological and health impacts of Congolese mining for 15 years working For several NGOs it is something that companies that apply due diligence do not take so seriously.

From here the acid flows to the Lulu River that flows into the Congo near the Village. The people who live there will tell you that they can smell the acid. at night who is responsible for this ecological disaster the Komodo copper company first of all belongs to glencore their plant is there when the basin is full they open the drain then the color of the water changes and this foam forms from the lime that they throw to the basement to keep the pH value above seven the whole thing but I don't think it works because the toxic metals prevent the acid from being neutralized look at the water, the soil and the mud, the color shows that we still have a very serious problem here because This river also flows into the Congo, the Congo is one of the most important rivers in Africa. provides a large part of our country's water, it is almost impossible for us to get an appointment with the authorities to deal with this problem, even here at the provincial level, when the company wants an appointment, they get it immediately, why is this? , because the company pays and for the same reason support for NGO activities can almost be ruled out under pressure from NGOs glencore finally confirmed the sulfuric acid leak but said it had no effect on fish stocks and ponds surrounding areas, paradoxically the company has already begun to compensate the victims and clean the ponds celestein balza and his team detected very high values ​​of cobalt in the blood and urine of kolwezi mine workers in an article in the journal Nature's Sustainability reported changes in the DNA of children who had inhaled the Mineral dust is an indication of an increased risk of cancer today the professor is carrying out tests on around a hundred Prospectors are exposed to Rado a radioactive gas released from the rock containing uranium is strange If we cannot control the pollution we will soon have a big problem: there will be no life left in the rivers, even now most of the rivers in the former province of Katanga are polluted and not only here but in Kivu, practically everywhere they have extracted resources natural if we are not careful this country is going to have an ecological and toxicological scandal ecologicaltoxicology thank you Finland, the land of a thousand lakes, not only houses some of the largest oil reserves in Europe, but is also one of the most important sources of freshwater resources on the continent that could be threatened by mining in 2012. 1,000 hectares of rivers and lakes were destroyed when toxic sludge was released from the Sotkamo mine, which belonged to the Talvivara mining company, public pressure led to the mine was closed until the Terra farming group took over its operation Ten years later, the victims of the disaster are still waiting for compensation, what is the state of the lake lake kiltwell here yes, I hope it is not as bad as lakayavi at the moment is really full of algae again in the fall of 2015 it was really bad and for a few years now it has gotten worse again, we had to take out the Nets.

It would have been a waste of work otherwise I see, but are there still fish in Nakayavi? Only a few. Actually, yes, we are catching so few fish now that it doesn't even cover our costs. Do you remember the announcement of Lakayavi, the last desert in the region? The fish had a very good reputation. Fishing takes place in Lakayavi and is very well known. I think after the Kipsaka basin leaked, no one wanted our fish anymore, not even for free. The fishery was almost dead for about three or four years. Now there are fish again, but us.

I really have serious reservations about selling them and the wholesalers haven't caught fish professionally for years anyway and now you always have to go to court hearings, yes if you want to call it that it will probably continue at the beginning of In December at the district court they ended the first applause and the administrative court is also involved. What do you have to say about the hearings? I hope I live to see the day they make a decision. I'm Thomas and we've already been suffering as a result of the damages caused for 10 years, you could say that now that Terra Farmer has taken over most of the insolvency, each of the defendants has a team of two or three renowned lawyers who have really thrown HPP Partners the most expensive. law firms in the country I will continue to fight and fight I am not going to settle for that it is understandable it is unfair and it is wrong for you all lost your case even though you had expert reports showing what the pollution did to the fish in the lake how he and eight other victims make a living do not file any appeal because they cannot afford it Environmental activist Mika Flirt knows all the details of the 2012 disaster is outraged by the negligence of the mind's former owner and is among those who called for his closing we were worried about terraforma at that time it was called talavivaramine we were worried about its impact on waters and they claimed that it is an itch and the most environmentally friendly mind in the world and I won't post anything about sewage etc. which those were the marketing lines to the local politicians and the regional politicians and the people of why they should support this great mind, the reason for Talavera's bankruptcy.

I guess there are a lot of them and I think I'm not the right person to delve into that, but in the basic environment, you know where the ideas when they invested in the site have now proven to be the right ones. They missed some very important elements like water treatment, so all the rainwater that is raining in this area. and it touches the mineral or the rock and it needs to be collected and purified before it can be returned to nature and these types of facilities were not originally planned, unfortunately, so that must have been one of the reasons they did it.

Finding the problems with water, the first thing we did was to build a central water treatment plant, this is the central water treatment plant with the best technology available, as well as this discharge pipe from the central treatment plant of water until the end. large waterways and we start purifying the water so that when it rains a lot it doesn't impact, it doesn't innovate, it disrupts production, we purify the water and release it through bioleaching, which is a technology that they invested in and built here it didn't work consistently for It's time, so we've done a lot of additional development to make it work stably, but the basic ideas are the same as they were.

Mega fluid does not trust industry claims. Nor are Yari Natunan, biochemist and president of the NGO Mining Watch Finland, monitoring the surroundings of the mine operated by the Terra farmer. He's foaming down there because of the lime. Lime is used as a precipitation agent for the metal grown here. There was a big leak here, the sediment is contaminated and the water quality is. I can really see it in the sediment. This black layer there are plants there. I'll take it out now. You can see the layers here and the black, maybe there are heavy metals. When it is washed away with the water there is a leak in the pipe up there is the Tailings Wastewater Basin and it is full of contaminated water and they say it is just humus but the nickel content in the stream is still above the standard of Environmental Quality and probably the same thing happens with cadmium, the values ​​are many times higher than what is allowed to release heavy metals into the environment.

Terra Farmer admitted there was a leak in 2020, but claims it was later sealed, says concentrations were measured. by Yari natunan come from natural sources the biochemist doubts that the water treatment pipe could break at any time and release a toxic mixture into the ground the biggest problem here is this mine the waste rock the tailings that cannot be used that have sulfur The nine percent sulfur content reacts with water and air. If you have a ton of waste rock, the reaction would be with water and air, it will produce 300 kilos of concentrated sulfuric acid. This reaction continues for thousands of years as long as that type of rock is still here.

The mine's supporters call us nimbis, which means not in my backyard, as if it's something local, but they want to walk out their front door and find a 300-kilogram landfill full of toxic waste that destroys the environment. atmosphere. illegal should not be happening at all, that does not mean that year after year just to obtain nickel for the battery of a single electric car, 50 tons of this dangerous waste is produced that is terrifying, 50 tons just for the nickel in a single battery of electric car with the The car buyer might like to have these issues delivered to the driveway along with the car.

It is located in the southeast of Finland. It is the largest lake in the country. In less than two years, ten exploration permits were issued for the surrounding region. The people who live in the lake are. Concerned about the future of its tourism industry, the area is also part of the EU's Natura 2000 program, nothing survives, not a single species and the water no longer circulates, everything sinks to the bottom, this is how the substances that precipitate have sunk to the bottom. Bottom line is why the water is so clear in my opinion, that is evidence of water toxicity, basically what happens with toxic waste from your legs.

The frozen bottom lowers the PH and stops the natural circulation of the lake, so in spring and autumn the water changes that die and when that dies, then the entire lake Misa mink became an activist when she noticed that the mining activities in the lake Saima increased. Remember an incident from the 1990s when toxic wastewater from a cobalt mine leaked and wiped out all life in one of the foreign lakes I just don't think it's a solution for the Nordic countries and especially Finland to become the resource of materials for batteries for the rest of the EU so we can produce more electric cars and all the devices we need to get rid of fossil fuels, so it's mine, it destroys biodiversity, we have to deal with it and then the other part is water sweet, so you need to think a lot more about this and a long-term strategy, you know, what are humans like?

To survive on this planet we are going to need fresh water and Finland has more fresh frontier resources than probably any other country in Europe. There is not a single mine in Finland that has closed the circulation of water. If only a part of these toxins ends up in our water, we can already imagine what this country will be like in one hundred or two hundred years. It is estimated that the demand for raw materials to manufacture batteries It will increase 30 times by 2040. Only then will we be able to meet the emissions targets of the Paris Agreement: it is an absurd figure.

In Finland there are currently nine mines for metal oars. It doesn't take a math genius to know what the situation here will be like in 2014 if we end up becoming the amazing Europe that the EU wants to make. Regardless of the flows of materials coming from the Congo into China, of course, that is correct, because the situation regarding liability is even worse than here, which is why we have started the legislative initiative on limits on mining here. I would like to thank you all again because tonight we have exceeded 50,000 signatures, so the project will now be officially debated in Parliament.

Yes, abroad, it is in the interest of the planet that people drive electric vehicles if you are going to buy a car, you know this well. I would say get a bike, but if you want a car, get an electric car instead of a diesel or petrol one, in the interest of the planet and future generations that's fine, but if you do, ask the car manufacturer what it implies. your battery, what are you doing to make sure that the mining that extracts the metals that go into that battery, what are you doing to make sure that it is not harmful, that it does not harm the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo or other countries where is this mining carried out? place Felix just a Katie has been president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 2019.

She promised to renegotiate the mining treaties, but the process is taking time and the Congolese people stillfails to benefit from the wealth of resources of its country, meanwhile millions of EVS continue to circulate through our streets powered by cobalt from the Congo and every day there are more around the world the protests are becoming stronger and more environmental and human rights are organizing to confront the mining industry, political leaders can no longer ignore their voices, but there are foreigners