Forced Labor in Congo’s Coltan Mines: The Human Cost of Critical Minerals

FORCED LABOR

On September 21, 2026, Amnesty International published new evidence from two mining areas in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo that brings the human cost of the global critical-minerals economy into unusually sharp focus. Researchers documented allegations of forced labor, forced recruitment, arbitrary detention, torture and killings around the Rubaya coltan mine in North Kivu and the Lomera gold mine in South Kivu, both in areas controlled by the March 23 Movement, known as M23. Amnesty also says minerals from these areas have been trafficked across the border into Rwanda, creating a chain of alleged abuse that begins underground and extends into regional and international trade.

The findings matter far beyond eastern Congo because coltan is the ore from which tantalum is extracted, a metal valued for its ability to store electrical charge and withstand heat and corrosion. It is used in electronic components found across modern technology, while the Democratic Republic of the Congo is one of the most important mineral-producing countries in the world. U.S. Geological Survey data show that the DRC accounted for an estimated 51 percent of global tantalum production in 2024, as well as around 75 percent of global cobalt output. (usgs.gov)

The central question is therefore not whether the world can simply stop using critical minerals, because modern communications, energy infrastructure, transportation, medicine, manufacturing and defense all depend upon them. The harder question is whether international markets can build supply chains capable of identifying where minerals came from, who benefited from their extraction, what happened to the people who mined them and what happened to the land around them before those materials disappeared into global trade.

That question sits at the heart of Not For Sale’s work on modern-day slavery and ecocide. Our work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and our partnership with critical-minerals company M2i Global, starts from the premise that a mineral cannot be considered responsibly sourced simply because its paperwork appears legitimate at the end of a supply chain. Responsibility has to extend back to the mine, the worker, the community and the ecosystem from which it came, while recognizing that the DRC’s mineral wealth itself is not the problem. Explore Not For Sale’s work in DR Congo

What This Article Covers

• What Amnesty International says happened at the Rubaya coltan and Lomera gold mines.
• How forced labor differs from mineral trafficking and human trafficking.
• Why coltan and tantalum from the DRC matter to global technology supply chains.
• How armed control, weak oversight and cross-border trade can obscure a mineral’s true origin.
• Why mining-related exploitation can also become an environmental issue.
• What responsible mineral due diligence should require from companies and governments.
• How Not For Sale and M2i Global are working on the human, environmental and supply-chain dimensions of critical minerals.

Key Takeaways

• Amnesty International says it documented forced labor, forced recruitment, torture, arbitrary detention and killings connected with M23-controlled artisanal mining areas in eastern DRC.
• Amnesty interviewed 26 people and documented the reported summary killing of 18 artisanal miners around Rubaya and Lomera.
• The organization says gold and coltan were moved from M23-controlled areas toward Rwanda through established cross-border routes.
• Rwanda did not respond to Amnesty’s requests for comment on the new investigation, while Rwanda has previously rejected allegations that it benefits unlawfully from Congolese mineral resources.
• The DRC is central to global critical-mineral production, including tantalum, making responsible sourcing from the country an international issue rather than a purely Congolese one.
• Responsible sourcing should not mean abandoning the DRC or its artisanal miners, because OECD guidance emphasizes responsible engagement, traceability and risk-based due diligence in conflict-affected areas rather than indiscriminate withdrawal.
• Not For Sale partner M2i Global is developing critical-mineral infrastructure that includes material traceability, processing, recycling and supply-chain verification, alongside a partnership with Not For Sale focused on labor and environmental oversight.

Why This Story Matters Now

Amnesty International’s investigation arrives at a moment when governments and industries around the world are competing to secure access to critical minerals. Six days before the report was published, the Congolese government announced the creation of a DRC-USA task force intended to accelerate implementation of a strategic minerals partnership with the United States, while critical-mineral security has become an increasingly important industrial priority across the United States, Europe and other major economies as demand grows for materials used in energy, electronics, advanced manufacturing and defense. (reuters.com)

This makes the conditions under which minerals are produced increasingly consequential, because securing access to a mineral supply and knowing that the supply has not been connected to forced labor, armed-group financing, serious environmental damage or illegally traded material are two different problems. Amnesty’s findings illustrate why those questions cannot be separated, with the organization saying that M23 exercises tight control over dozens of artisanal mining sites in North and South Kivu where tens of thousands of people depend on mining for income. At the sites investigated, researchers found evidence that workers could be subjected to coercion and violence while valuable minerals continued moving toward international markets. (amnesty.org)

This is also why the phrase critical minerals needs to be understood in human terms rather than only as an industrial or geopolitical category. A mineral may be critical to an economy, an energy system or a national-security strategy, but the people extracting it should not become expendable in the process, nor should the communities living around extraction sites be treated as incidental to the global race for resources.

What Amnesty International Found at the Mines

Amnesty International’s briefing, DRC: “We didn’t come to play”, is based on interviews with 26 people including artisanal miners, mining specialists, mine-shaft owners and relatives of people who were killed, alongside photographs and video evidence from mining areas. The research focuses on Rubaya in North Kivu and Lomera in South Kivu, two areas where Amnesty says armed control has created the conditions for serious human-rights abuses connected to mineral extraction. (amnesty.org)

At Rubaya and Lomera, Amnesty says it documented the summary killing of 18 artisanal miners. According to witness and family testimony gathered by researchers, ten were beaten to death, two were shot and six abducted miners were later found dead, while the organization also documented allegations of torture, ill-treatment, arbitrary detention and forced recruitment. (amnesty.org)

Some of the most significant evidence concerns forced labor. Miners told Amnesty that people had been compelled to work underground, sometimes for periods longer than a week, and that workers could be beaten for requesting breaks, failing to surrender minerals or committing minor perceived infractions. Amnesty also documented underground detention areas and described cases in which detained miners were threatened with transfer to M23 military training unless ransom payments were made, creating a system in which labor, punishment and armed coercion appear to overlap. (amnesty.org)

These allegations meet an important threshold in understanding exploitation because the International Labour Organization defines forced labor as work or service exacted under threat of a penalty and undertaken without genuine voluntary consent. The nature of the work itself is not what determines whether labor is forced, which means that a person can be mining, farming, manufacturing or performing another otherwise lawful activity and still be subjected to forced labor if coercion removes their ability to choose whether they work or whether they can leave. (ilo.org)

Forced Labor, Human Trafficking and Mineral Trafficking Are Not the Same Thing

Precision matters because three different forms of trafficking and exploitation can easily become confused in reporting around conflict minerals. Amnesty’s investigation explicitly documents forced labor and forced recruitment, while it also alleges the trafficking of gold and coltan, meaning that minerals were illicitly moved out of M23-controlled territory and across borders. Those findings should not automatically be rewritten as evidence that every affected miner was a victim of human trafficking, because the legal concepts overlap in some circumstances but are not interchangeable.

Human trafficking involves the recruitment, transfer, harboring or receipt of people for exploitation through means such as force, coercion, fraud, deception or abuse of vulnerability, subject to the specific legal framework involved. Forced labor can be the purpose for which somebody is trafficked, but a finding of forced labor does not automatically establish every legal element required to prove trafficking. The distinction does not lessen the seriousness of Amnesty’s findings; instead, it makes the reporting more accurate by recognizing that the evidence currently establishes a mining system in which Amnesty says some workers were compelled to work through violence and threat while the minerals they produced were themselves moving through illicit channels.

For readers wanting a broader explanation of how forced labor, environmental destruction and mineral supply chains can overlap, Not For Sale has previously examined the relationship in detail. The challenge is not simply that different forms of exploitation coexist, but that global demand, environmental degradation, organized crime and weak governance can become mutually reinforcing parts of the same economic system. Read: How Human Trafficking, Environmental Destruction and Critical Minerals Are Connected

How Gold and Coltan Allegedly Moved Toward Rwanda

Amnesty says its investigators found evidence that gold from M23-controlled territory was transported through established routes into neighboring Rwanda. At Lomera, researchers collected testimony describing sacks of mineralized soil containing gold being loaded onto boats and transported across Lake Kivu toward Kamembe in Rwanda’s Western Province, illustrating how quickly a mineral can move from an isolated extraction site into a cross-border commercial system. (amnesty.org)

The organization argues that the scale and circumstances of the alleged extraction and transfer mean the plunder of gold and coltan may amount to the war crime of pillage. Amnesty further states that Rwandan individuals were present at the mining sites and alleges that Rwanda has benefited from resources trafficked from Congolese territory, although neither M23 nor Rwandan government officials responded to Amnesty’s requests for comment on the investigation. Rwanda has previously denied accusations that it profits unlawfully from mineral resources linked to M23-controlled territory. (amnesty.org)

These claims therefore remain allegations supported by Amnesty’s investigation rather than findings of an international court, a distinction that is especially important where accusations of state responsibility, complicity or war crimes are concerned. What the investigation nevertheless exposes is the supply-chain problem created when minerals move from conflict-affected territory into another jurisdiction, because the farther a material travels from its place of extraction, the easier it can become for the conditions surrounding that extraction to disappear behind new traders, paperwork, processing facilities and certificates of origin.

Why Coltan Matters to the Rest of the World

Coltan is short for columbite-tantalite, an ore containing tantalum and niobium. Tantalum is particularly valuable because it can perform reliably in small, high-performance electronic components and withstand demanding operating conditions, which helps explain its importance to electronics, communications and other advanced technologies.

The DRC’s role in this market is substantial. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the country was the world’s leading tantalum producer in 2024, providing an estimated 51 percent of global output, while artisanal and small-scale miners also play an important role in Congolese production of tantalum, gold, tin and other minerals. (usgs.gov)

Rubaya is particularly significant within that system. Associated Press, reporting on Amnesty’s findings, noted estimates that the mining area accounts for around 15 percent of global tantalum supply, meaning that events in what can appear to be a remote mining district are connected to industries and consumers thousands of miles away. (apnews.com)

This does not mean that a specific phone, computer or electronic component can automatically be linked to forced labor at Rubaya, because supply chains are too complex for such a claim without evidence tracing an individual material shipment. What it does mean is that companies using tantalum have reason to know that sourcing from the African Great Lakes region can carry heightened conflict and human-rights risks, and that responsible due diligence requires more than accepting a supplier’s declaration at face value.

The Environmental Layer Cannot Be Ignored

The new Amnesty investigation is principally a human-rights investigation and does not provide a comprehensive ecological assessment of Rubaya or Lomera, so it would be inaccurate to present the report itself as evidence of ecocide at either site. There is, however, strong wider evidence that artisanal mining can contribute substantially to environmental loss in eastern DRC, creating a broader context in which human exploitation and ecosystem pressure need to be considered together rather than as unrelated issues.

A 2024 study published in Nature Sustainability found that the establishment of artisanal mines can trigger deforestation well beyond the physical footprint of a mine itself. Researchers estimated that indirect forest loss associated with agriculture and settlements around mining areas was substantially greater than the forest directly cleared for extraction, and that artisanal mining explained at least 6.6 percent of total deforestation across the eastern DRC study area. (nature.com)

That matters because environmental destruction and labor exploitation can reinforce each other without being identical problems. Mining can attract large populations into areas without adequate infrastructure, increase pressure on forests and water, and reshape local economies, while environmental loss can in turn erode agriculture and other livelihoods, leaving communities increasingly dependent on the same extractive economy that contributed to those changes.

Not For Sale has described this relationship as the intersection between modern-day slavery and ecocide, where harm to people and harm to ecosystems can emerge from the same extractive system. Our reporting from Peru and Brazil has documented comparable patterns around illegal gold economies, while recognizing that the political, environmental and labor circumstances differ significantly between countries and should never be treated as interchangeable. Read: Illegal Gold Mining in Peru and Forced Labor Read: From Illegal Mines to Forced Labor

Who Is Most at Risk?

The people facing the immediate danger are the miners and communities living within armed-group-controlled territory, where access to work, movement and income can become inseparable from the power exercised by armed actors. Artisanal mining can provide essential income in places where alternative employment is limited, meaning that a miner’s presence at a site should never be interpreted either as proof that exploitation is voluntary or as evidence that every person working there is being coerced.

That distinction matters because eastern DRC’s mineral economy supports genuine livelihoods as well as creating serious risks. Research in South Kivu has found that artisanal mining can form an important part of household livelihood diversification and, in some cases, contribute to food security, which means responsible policy has to distinguish between protecting miners from coercion and criminal control and destroying the economic activity on which families depend. (sciencedirect.com)

People become particularly vulnerable when armed actors control access to work, movement and income, because refusing an instruction can then mean detention, violence, lost wages or forced recruitment. In those circumstances, ordinary labor protections cease to function and the problem becomes larger than whether an individual mine follows workplace rules, raising a more fundamental question about who exercises power over the entire local economy and who is able to challenge it.

The System Behind the Harm

One of the easiest mistakes in reporting critical minerals is to focus exclusively on the mine, even though extraction is only the first stage of a much longer supply chain. After leaving the ground, minerals can move through traders, exporters, border crossings, processors, refiners, component manufacturers and industrial customers before entering finished products, and at every additional stage physical material can be consolidated, transformed or mixed with material from other sources.

Without reliable chain-of-custody information, the distance between the original mine and the final buyer can become a form of invisibility. A company purchasing refined material several stages later may have little direct contact with the community where the mineral was extracted, yet its purchasing decisions still influence the incentives operating upstream, which is why traceability is not simply a technical issue but a question of whether commercial systems preserve or erase information about risk.

The OECD has developed due-diligence guidance specifically for minerals originating from conflict-affected and high-risk areas. Its framework asks companies to establish strong management systems, identify and assess supply-chain risks, respond to those risks, obtain independent audits where appropriate and publicly report on their due-diligence efforts, with the aim of preventing mineral purchasing decisions from contributing to serious human-rights abuses, armed conflict and financial crime. (oecd.org)

That responsibility does not end with the company digging the mineral out of the ground, because traders, refiners, manufacturers and downstream buyers all influence whether high-risk material can enter legitimate markets. Effective due diligence therefore depends on information being carried forward through the supply chain rather than disappearing each time a material changes hands.

Why Simply Abandoning Congo Is Not the Answer

There is an important danger in the response to investigations like this one, because companies that treat the entire DRC or African Great Lakes region as too risky to engage with can unintentionally damage legitimate producers while failing to stop illicit trade. Responsible artisanal miners can lose access to reputable buyers, while material from abusive or illegal operations may continue moving through less transparent routes into international markets.

The OECD has explicitly cautioned against blanket disengagement from conflict-affected and high-risk regions. Its latest responsible-minerals guidance emphasizes that responsible engagement can support diversification, resilience and development, while indiscriminate avoidance can simply shift trade toward fewer buyers and processors without resolving the underlying human-rights and governance risks. (oecd.org)

That creates a more demanding standard than either buying without questions or refusing to buy at all. Companies need to know where material came from, assess the conditions at origin, investigate warning signs, work with credible local institutions and disengage from individual suppliers when severe risks cannot be mitigated, while also avoiding decisions that punish whole communities for abuses committed by armed groups or criminal networks.

Amnesty’s recommendations are correspondingly targeted. It has called for countries and companies to cease purchasing coltan and gold from Rwanda, or from processors buying those minerals from Rwandan suppliers, until Rwanda demonstrates that material trafficked from DRC is no longer entering those supply chains, while also urging the United States and European Union member states not to establish mining agreements involving Rubaya or other M23-controlled sites without independent international human-rights access and oversight. (amnesty.org)

What Governments and Institutions Are Doing

Critical-mineral policy is moving rapidly because governments increasingly see secure mineral access as both an economic and strategic priority. The United States has expanded investment in domestic and allied processing, the European Union is pursuing its own mineral-security policies and projects, and the DRC established a task force in September 2026 to help implement its strategic-minerals partnership with the United States. (reuters.com)

The challenge is ensuring that security of supply does not become detached from security for the people living where those supplies originate. A contract may secure tonnage, but it does not by itself establish whether labor was voluntary, whether an armed group profited, whether communities were consulted or whether environmental damage has been addressed, which is why mineral diplomacy and human-rights due diligence increasingly have to operate together.

For governments, this means treating labor conditions, governance and environmental accountability as part of critical-mineral strategy rather than as secondary social concerns. For businesses, it means recognizing that knowing the identity of a direct supplier is not enough if the origin and conditions of the material behind that supplier remain uncertain.

What Still Needs to Change

The first gap is traceability, because minerals need credible records capable of following material from source through processing and into downstream markets. Traceability systems should make it harder to relabel or mix material from high-risk sites without scrutiny, while also providing companies with enough information to make meaningful decisions rather than relying on generic assurances of compliance.

The second gap is verification, because digital records are valuable only if the information entering them is accurate. A sophisticated database cannot make a falsely declared origin true, so effective systems require independent inspection, worker engagement, community information, auditing and mechanisms for raising concerns without retaliation.

The third gap is economic, because responsible sourcing cannot succeed if legitimate producers are expected to meet higher standards while illicit competitors receive market access without bearing the same costs. Buyers and policymakers therefore have to create commercial incentives for verified production rather than treating responsible sourcing purely as a compliance expense, otherwise the market can continue rewarding opacity.

Workers and local communities also need a meaningful role in the system because people living beside a mine often know first when labor abuses, pollution, illegal taxation or armed control are occurring. A supply chain that can trace a shipment but cannot hear from the people who produced it is only partially transparent, and any credible model of responsible sourcing has to bring those two forms of knowledge together.

Where M2i Global Fits Into the Critical-Minerals Problem

Not For Sale is working on these questions with M2i Global, a current Not For Sale partner focused on critical-mineral infrastructure and supply-chain resilience. The relevance of that partnership is not simply that M2i operates within the same sector discussed in Amnesty’s investigation, but that its work addresses the problem of what happens between the mine and the market, where information about origin, labor conditions and environmental impact can otherwise become increasingly difficult to follow. Explore Not For Sale’s partnership with M2i Global

M2i describes itself as an infrastructure and technology platform operating between mineral origin and end market. Its model brings together mineral reserves and custody, domestic processing and refining, recycling, and technology intended to trace materials through the supply chain, with the company saying it is developing systems in which material lots can be tracked from intake through processing and final delivery to create an auditable chain of custody. (m2i.global)

Its partnership with Not For Sale adds a specific human-rights and environmental dimension to that work. M2i says the partnership is intended to integrate independent labor and environmental oversight into its mineral supply chain, including assessment of forced-labor and child-labor risks, worker rights, water contamination, land remediation and community impacts, so that responsible sourcing is not reduced to a question of geography or paperwork alone. (m2i.global)

That work is directly relevant to what the Amnesty investigation exposes because traceability cannot be limited to answering where a mineral was shipped from. A credible system has to help establish where the mineral was actually extracted, under whose control, under what labor conditions and with what consequences for surrounding communities, while preserving enough information for downstream buyers to understand the risks attached to the material they are purchasing.

M2i is also working on recycling and recovery of critical materials from batteries, industrial scrap and legacy waste. Circular supply is not a complete alternative to mining, particularly as mineral demand grows, but recovering materials that have already been extracted can reduce some pressure for additional primary extraction while creating another source of critical-mineral supply. Learn more about M2i Global’s critical-minerals work

No technology can guarantee responsible sourcing by itself, and blockchain, serialization, certificates and digital traceability become meaningful only when the underlying information is independently credible. That is why the combination of technical traceability, labor standards, environmental oversight and community engagement matters more than any single technological solution, and why partnerships between supply-chain companies and organizations focused on human rights can play a practical role in closing the information gaps that allow exploitation to remain hidden.

What Not For Sale’s Perspective Adds

Not For Sale has worked in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as part of a wider model focused on people, planet and social innovation, with the principle that trafficking prevention cannot begin only after somebody has been exploited. Where communities have few viable livelihoods outside dangerous extractive economies, vulnerability is structural, and where global buyers cannot distinguish responsible minerals from material connected to coercion, the market itself can reward opacity.

Environmental harm adds another layer because when forests, farmland, waterways or other sources of livelihood are damaged, the range of economic choices available to communities can narrow further. That can deepen dependence on extractive industries and increase vulnerability to exploitation, creating a cycle in which environmental and human harm are not separate consequences but different expressions of the same economic pressure.

The response therefore has to operate at several levels at once. People subjected to exploitation need protection and dignity, communities need viable economic alternatives, landscapes damaged by extractive activity need restoration, and international companies need mineral supply chains in which provenance, labor conditions and environmental performance are visible rather than assumed.

That is why Not For Sale’s work increasingly extends into supply-chain design alongside its frontline anti-trafficking programs. Our approach does not treat the DRC’s mineral wealth as the problem, but instead asks whether an economic system can continue extracting enormous value from minerals while allowing the people and landscapes at the beginning of the supply chain to absorb an unequal share of the cost. Explore Not For Sale’s approach to ecocide and human exploitation

What Readers Can Do

Consumers cannot personally audit a tantalum supply chain, and the burden of preventing forced labor should not be transferred from corporations and governments onto people buying everyday electronics. Individual choices can nevertheless help create demand for better information, particularly when consumers, investors, procurement teams and institutional buyers ask companies what responsible-minerals standards they use, whether their suppliers apply OECD-aligned due diligence, how mineral origins are verified and what happens when serious labor or conflict risks are discovered.

It is also important to support organizations and local institutions that work with mining communities rather than speaking about them from afar. Responsible sourcing succeeds only when miners and communities have meaningful economic alternatives, access to rights and a voice in decisions concerning the resources beneath their land, while international buyers need systems capable of distinguishing responsible production from exploitation rather than assuming that every mineral from a high-risk country carries the same history.

The minerals beneath eastern Congo are valuable because the modern world needs them, and that value should make the conditions under which they are extracted more visible rather than less. Amnesty International’s latest investigation describes an economy in which artisanal miners were allegedly forced to work, beaten, detained and in some cases killed while gold and coltan moved away from the mines and toward international trade, creating allegations that require investigation and accountability in their own right. (amnesty.org)

The investigation also exposes the much larger challenge confronting the critical-minerals economy as governments and companies attempt to build cleaner energy systems, more resilient technology supply chains and greater mineral security. Those goals cannot be measured only by how much material reaches the market, because the real test is whether we can know where that material came from, whether the people who produced it were free, whether communities shared in its value and whether the systems surrounding its extraction protected rather than consumed the places from which it came.

Critical minerals may be essential to the future, but the people who mine them cannot be treated as a cost that future is allowed to hide. A genuinely responsible mineral economy has to preserve the link between the finished product and the human and environmental conditions at its origin, because once that connection is lost, exploitation becomes easier to overlook and far harder to challenge.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is coltan?

Coltan is the commonly used name for columbite-tantalite ore, from which tantalum and niobium can be extracted. Tantalum is used in electronics and other high-performance industrial applications because of its electrical properties, heat resistance and reliability in compact components.

Why is the Democratic Republic of the Congo important for tantalum?

The DRC is one of the world’s most important tantalum-producing countries, with U.S. Geological Survey figures indicating that it accounted for an estimated 51 percent of global tantalum production in 2024. Its importance to the global market means that labor conditions, governance and traceability within Congolese mining can have implications far beyond the country itself. 

What did Amnesty International find at the Rubaya and Lomera mines?

Amnesty says it documented forced labor, forced recruitment, arbitrary detention, torture, ill-treatment, killings and pillage associated with M23 at the two mining areas. The organization interviewed 26 people and documented the reported summary killing of 18 miners while also gathering testimony concerning coercion and abuse in the mining system. 

Is M23 accused of using forced labor?

Yes. Amnesty International says miners described being forced to work underground and being subjected to violence or punishment, while the organization classified the documented conduct as forced labor and said some of the abuses may amount to war crimes. (amnesty.org)

Is forced labor the same as human trafficking?

No. Forced labor and human trafficking can overlap, but they are distinct legal concepts, with human trafficking concerning recruitment, movement, transfer, harboring or receipt of people for exploitation under specified circumstances, while forced labor concerns work performed involuntarily under threat of penalty or coercion.

Is Rwanda accused of receiving minerals from M23-controlled areas?

Amnesty alleges that gold and coltan from M23-controlled areas were trafficked into Rwanda and says Rwandan individuals were involved at the mining sites. Rwanda did not respond to Amnesty’s request for comment on the new investigation and has previously denied allegations that it profits unlawfully from Congolese mineral resources. 

Are all minerals from the DRC connected to forced labor?

No. It would be inaccurate and harmful to characterize all Congolese mineral production as exploitative because the DRC contains industrial and artisanal mining operations operating under very different conditions, which is precisely why traceability, independent verification and site-specific due diligence are necessary.

Should companies stop sourcing minerals from the DRC?

Not necessarily. OECD guidance supports responsible engagement with conflict-affected and high-risk regions rather than blanket avoidance, meaning companies should identify individual risks, trace suppliers, investigate warning signs and stop sourcing where serious risks cannot be prevented or mitigated without automatically excluding entire countries or communities. 

How is critical-mineral mining connected to environmental harm?

Mining can contribute to forest clearance, water contamination, land disturbance and wider settlement and agricultural expansion around mining areas. Research in eastern DRC has found that indirect deforestation associated with artisanal mining can extend well beyond the land physically cleared for the mine itself, illustrating how extraction can reshape surrounding landscapes as well as the mine site.

What is M2i Global doing about critical-mineral supply chains?

M2i Global is developing infrastructure for securing, processing, storing, recycling and tracing critical minerals. Through its partnership with Not For Sale, the company says it is also integrating labor, human-rights and environmental assessment into its sourcing approach so that traceability addresses not only where material moves, but also the conditions under which it was produced. 

Can recycling reduce forced-labor risk in critical minerals?

Recycling can reduce demand for some newly mined material by recovering metals already present in batteries, electronics and industrial waste. It cannot eliminate the need for mining, but circular supply can diversify mineral sources and reduce pressure on primary extraction when combined with responsible sourcing and effective oversight.

What can technology companies do?

Technology companies can map their mineral supply chains, require OECD-aligned due diligence, investigate high-risk sourcing locations, improve chain-of-custody data, commission credible independent audits and publish meaningful information about how identified risks are addressed. The objective should be to make the origin and conditions of mineral production more visible throughout the supply chain rather than allowing responsibility to disappear between suppliers.