The Lion's Pride Volume 9 (January 2018) | Page 71

mine, those rare earths amounted to 0.2 percent of what gets pulled
out of the ground. The other 99.8 percent—now contaminated with
toxic chemicals—is dumped back into the environment.
Cobalt, used in a battery cell’s cathode, is valued because it is very
strong for its weight, deals with temperature well, and has good
conductive properties. Aaron Robinson, a long-time writer for Road and
Track magazine, explains the negative impact of mining for cobalt:
Cobalt extraction typically goes hand in hand with copper and nickel
mining. About 80 percent of the world’s cobalt supply is believed to be
in central Africa’s “copper belt,” a band of ancient, mineral-endowed
soil straddling Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo
(DRC)… The mining of these minerals takes place amid “one of the
worst conflict situations in the world,” says Congo policy analyst Aaron
Hall of the Enough Project… In the DRC’s eastern provinces of North
and South Kivu, various rebel factions and the national army conduct
mining at gunpoint or extract levies at checkpoints along the roads that
fund their fighting… The open-pit mining that produces cobalt is
causing serious environmental degradation in Katanga. And locals have
long complained that multinational mining conglomerates are draining
the country of its natural treasures without contributing enough to its
economy or development.
Graphite, largely mined in China poses additional environmental
concerns. According to the article written by Keith Bradsher, “These