About 3000 people, including hundreds of children, scrounge for cobalt in this broad artisanal mining zone just outside an industrial mining concession (in background). All the artisanal cobalt is sold via intermediaries to industrial mines. There is no "clean cobalt" here.
Many industrial mines in the DRC have processing plants that use massive amounts of sulphuric acid to leach copper and cobalt from ore, which produces a highly toxic, mustard colored gas cloud that floats over everything: land, rivers, animals, villages...and children like these.