Mining companies publicly separate hand-dug 'artisanal' cobalt from mechanized industrial output, but Kara documents that informal diggers, including children, feed their sacks into the same depots and supply chains as formal mines. Because the ore is physically indistinguishable once pooled, every buyer's claim of a 'clean' industrial-only supply is unverifiable at the point where it matters.
Kara describes families, including young children, digging cobalt by hand in pits and tunnels around Kolwezi for roughly a dollar or two a day, washing ore in toxic water and suffering collapses, injuries, and birth defects linked to heavy-metal exposure. These are the people at the physical origin of the cobalt in rechargeable phone and electric-vehicle batteries.
The products marketed as the solution to fossil-fuel pollution (electric vehicles, renewable storage) depend on a mineral whose extraction poisons water, destroys villages, and relies on coerced near-free labor. The moral branding of the end product conceals the human and environmental cost concentrated at the raw-material source.
Instead of accepting a finished device as a neutral object, follow each component back to the specific human who extracted its materials and ask what that person was paid and what it cost their body. This reframing converts an abstract global market into a chain of identifiable people whose suffering is a precondition of the convenience.