This reporting is part of Stuff’s fact-checking project, The Whole Truth – Te Tikanga Katoa. You can read the rest of our fact-checks here.

Read this story in te reo Māori and English here. / Pānuitia tēnei i te reo Māori me te reo Pākehā ki konei.

What’s the issue?

If you’ve heard electric cars are built out of materials mined by children, you aren’t alone. Criticising the Government’s subsidies on lower-emitting vehicles, NZ First politician Shane Jones asked: “Have they seriously considered the ethical aspects of where the EV battery components come from in terms of child labour?”

What we found

It’s likely Jones is discussing cobalt mining. A full EV might have 13kg of cobalt in its battery. Hybrids – whether they plug in or not – have similar batteries, though they’re typically smaller.

The metal’s origin is regularly used as a critique of cleaner vehicles. It should be noted, however, that cobalt surrounds us: in laptops, smartphones and hearing aids.

A brand-new, combustion engine petrol car has much less cobalt than an EV, but it’s still in the vehicle’s tyres and airbags. Small amounts remove sulphur from crude oil, when it’s refined into petrol.

Cobalt often comes out of the same mines as copper – another key component of petrol cars and EVs.

Three-quarters of all cobalt and about 8% of copper originates from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where human rights abuses have been documented.

In the 1990s, the Congolese government and the state copper-and-cobalt-mining company faltered.

Left without a livelihood, families in mineral-rich areas dug their own tunnels and established DIY mines.

After the years of war ended, the government tried to regulate mining and allocate prime mining sites to large corporate investors – but by then the horse had bolted.

Children younger than 16 are prohibited from working. But the law doesn’t extinguish the country’s poverty and government underfunding. Children work.

According to an investigation by Amnesty International, children are rarely underground. But plenty of mining work happens at the surface: minors might (illegally) sort through piles of leftovers from corporate sites in the hope of finding ore. Coming from these residues or self-run mines, cobalt will be washed and crushed, and the kids will sell their day’s work to metal traders.

Some are homeless and working for the next meal. But others labour alongside their mothers and siblings to top up their parents’ meagre incomes.

David Sturmes of the Fair Cobalt Alliance says mining “is one of the very few livelihood opportunities that is accessible to people who lack education”.

At least one Congolese child in 10 works outside the home. Most aren’t mining – many labour on farms or in other people’s homes.

School is supposed to be free, but government resourcing is tight, and it’s common for schools to charge a monthly fee. Some kids work part-time to pay for their schooling.

Charities providing free schooling and hot meals have helped.

Of course, children should not be forced to work. And cobalt is not good for them to work with: it can cause cancer and damage to the heart and lungs.

Not all cobalt production involves child miners. The larger corporate-run mines, for instance, typically don’t employ children.

Some cobalt purchasers such as Volvo have unveiled systems to trace their materials from origin, but that alone is not going to solve this problem.

The Congolese government has introduced mining reforms, including an idea to increase royalties on cobalt exports leaving it with more cash for oversight and education.

Activists such as the Fair Cobalt Alliance say there’s more officials could do, particularly for self-run mines long-established outside the government-sanctioned zones.

But in the Democratic Republic of Congo corruption is common, protestors are jailed and losing election candidates refuse to leave office. Meanwhile, armed rebel group M23 have seized territory in the country’s east.

At home, our Government could – like others – require big companies to scrutinise their supply chain and even make amends for human rights violations.

Some gadget and EV makers are working to eliminate cobalt from their battery recipes, which could reduce costs as well as ease ethical concerns.

That would put Congolese children out of mind, though not leave them better off, Amnesty International’s Mark Dummett says.

His organisation campaigns for improved cobalt mining, not the elimination of products using it.

In summary

So, in short, yes, the cobalt required for a host of products we use every day is – seemingly intractably – problematic.

EV batteries require comparatively large amounts of cobalt, but many everyday products contain the material.

It’s true, that to supplement family income or pay for schooling, Congolese children sort, clean and sell metal. The country is working to improve the industry, but there’s no fast solution to guilt-free cobalt.

If a New Zealand reader is trying to find a EV, or even a cellphone, that uses ethically mined cobalt, they should make sure its manufacturer traces the origin of the metal used, or is a member of the Fair Cobalt Alliance.