Siddharth Kara, a fellow at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, studied the work conducted by “artisanal” miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The description of these forced labor practices are chilling.
“Cobalt is toxic to touch and breathe-and there are hundreds of thousands of poor Congolese people touching and breathing it… Young mothers with babies strapped to their backs, all breathing in this toxic cobalt dust. There’s complete cross-contamination between industrial excavator-derived cobalt and cobalt dug by women and children with their bare hands.”
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