Please don't hurt our cobalt miners

This Washington Post has a story about cobalt, perhaps the most expensive element in a Li-Ion battery, shows how we actually get the element that is inside our batteries.

About half of the cobalt in the world is obtained from the Congo. Demand has risen as batteries have become more prevalent. This makes prices go up, which has lead more miners to dig for cobalt ore to cash in on the rush.

But a lot of these new miners are not those that work for the mining companies in the Congo. The mining companies are expanding, but not at the rate that allows for independent diggers to all work for them. These independents are finding their own way, cutting through the rock by hand and moving 2 tons of ore a day.

But it's dangerous work, and hard. And after the ore rises from the ground, children will frequently be employed to carry it to a stream for processing. Processing that the women do by hand. And this is hard on the children, but if they live through it, and pretty much all of them do, they will grow big enough to make their own holes and make $3-$4 dollars a day pounding the ore from the rock they pray will not fall down on them.

And the women will have to deal with water full of tailings. Those traces of metal in their water where they process the ore is the same water they use for the rest of life.

Seems like a harsh way to live. But if you ask them if we in the comfortable United States could remove this life from them and close their private mines, they'd tell us they'd rather we not do that.

Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winning economist wrote "In 1993, child workers in Bangladesh were found to be producing clothing for Wal-Mart, and Senator Tom Harkin proposed legislation banning imports from countries employing underage workers. The direct result was that Bangladeshi textile factories stopped employing children. But did the children go back to school? Did they return to happy homes? Not according to Oxfam, which found that the displaced child workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets -- and that a significant number were forced into prostitution."

Sure, we'd love these workers to have better lives at the same time we get better batteries. But please don't just close down the option they've chosen as the best option they have available today.

First, have a better option for them, and then close down their current lifestyle. But obviously, you realize that if you could make a choice for them that they can see is better, they would close down their dangerous work themselves before you had the chance.