This is fresh air, I'm Terry Gross.

Our smartphones and electric vehicles, emblems of the modern world, are powered by workers

in slave-like conditions, mining for cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Cobalt is an essential component of the rechargeable batteries used in devices and EVs.

Electric vehicles are supposed to be a big part of the solution to lower and carbon emissions,

but cobalt mining in the Congo is not only a human catastrophe, it's an environmental disaster.

Congo has more reserves of cobalt than the rest of the planet combined, but there's no such

thing as a clean supply chain of cobalt from the Congo, writes my guest, Sidharth Cara.

He says all cobalt, sourced from the Congo, is tainted by various degrees of abuse, including

slavery, child labor, forced labor, debt bondage, human trafficking, and incalculable environmental

harm.

Cara has been researching modern day slavery, human trafficking, and child labor for over

20 years, and has just published his fourth book, it's called Cobalt Red, and it's based

on his trips to the Congo in 2018, 2019, and 2021.

2020 was COVID year, and that's the year he didn't travel there.

He took great risks to go to the cobalt mines, many of which are guarded by the military

or militias, which definitely don't want human rights activists snooping around.

He says perceived troublemakers can be arrested, tortured, or worse.

Cara is a senior fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, an associate professor of

human trafficking and modern slavery at Nottingham University in England.

His book Sex Trafficking, Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, won the 2010 Frederick

Douglas book prize, awarded for the best book written in English on slavery or abolition.

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