Every link in the cobalt chain, inside one membership.
The Cobalt Institute speaks for the companies that mine, trade, refine and use cobalt: around sixty of them, from Glencore and CMOC to Gécamines and Somika. It is a thirty-five-year-old English company limited by guarantee, it tells the EU lobbying register it represents close to 70% of world production, and in 2019 it built the cobalt sector’s first industry assurance framework. That framework’s reporting obligation has been suspended since 2022, and the Institute’s own flagship report no longer mentions it at all.
Visit cobaltinstitute.org View its entry in the sector dataOwned by its members, funded by their subscriptions.
The Cobalt Institute is registered at Companies House as number 02647768, a private company limited by guarantee without share capital, incorporated on 23 September 1991 and carrying the name Cobalt Development Institute until 20 September 2017. Its registered office is 3rd Floor, 45 Albemarle Street, Mayfair, London. Before the Mayfair move it worked from 18 Jeffries Passage in Guildford — an address its EU lobbying declaration still gives today, which is one reason to read that filing as a historical document rather than a current one.
The organisation describes origins older than the English company. A Union of International Associations yearbook profile dates it to Brussels in 1957, and a Belgian entity under the Cobalt Development Institute name is reported to have been formed in 1983. Neither is established by a register this Hub has been able to open: the UIA entry sits behind a paywall beyond its founding-year line, and the Belgian company record is served behind a CAPTCHA. A 1957 Brussels founding and a 1991 English incorporation are two different events, and this page does not let one sentence imply they are the same.
Day-to-day it is run by a staff of sixteen under a Director General, Dinah McLeod, who arrived from the Global Cement and Concrete Association in 2023. The Institute published a separate industry-side President until at least December 2021; no one holds that title on its staff page today, and it names no individual as Executive Committee chair anywhere this Hub could find. Its company secretary, Rhian Harvey, is also its Head of Operations and Membership Services. Companies House records 109 officers across the company’s life, 106 of them resigned, drawn from British, Canadian, French, Belgian, Chinese and Japanese nationals since 1995.
Membership is published as two walls of logos and nothing else — sixty member marks, and eighteen marked out as the Executive Committee — with no membership class shown against any name, no individuals, and no total on the page. The total appears elsewhere, as an animated counter on the Institute’s About page reading sixty members across six continents. It publishes no fee schedule at all today: a 2023 schedule with five classes and figures from £500 to £53,000 has been reported, but nothing on the current site sets out a price, and prospective members are simply told to apply online.
The bulk of the work is regulatory.
It fights cobalt’s chemical classification.
Cobalt metal carries a harmonised EU classification as a category 1B carcinogen and reproductive toxicant and a category 2 mutagen. The Institute coordinates the industry’s REACH dossiers and has mounted sustained opposition to a proposed restriction on five cobalt salts, challenging the regulator’s 0.01 µg/m³ reference exposure value as technically unsound and unachievable, and pressing instead for a binding EU-wide occupational exposure limit.
It publishes the sector’s reference numbers.
The annual Cobalt Market Report is the most-cited open document on cobalt supply and demand; the 2025 edition, published in May 2026, runs to 77 pages. It is written for the Institute by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, so the Institute publishes those numbers, it does not measure them, and this Hub attributes them accordingly.
It represents the industry to regulators.
On the EU Transparency Register since February 2015 under ID 777244615994-94, declaring twelve lobbyists. Its stated policy scope runs from REACH and occupational exposure limits to the Critical Raw Materials Act, the Batteries Regulation, and trade access in the US and EU.
It built an assurance framework, then paused it.
CIRAF, the Cobalt Industry Responsible Assessment Framework, launched on 9 January 2019 after development with members from early 2017. It is a voluntary management tool aligned to the OECD Due Diligence Guidance, which participants apply to their own operations and report on themselves. Its annual public reporting obligation has been suspended since June 2022.
It joins other people’s initiatives.
The Institute joined the Fair Cobalt Alliance on 9 December 2021, its then-President saying that addressing the root causes of informal artisanal mining and child labour “must be a shared responsibility in which all actors across the value chain play their part.”
It convenes the industry.
The Cobalt Congress is the Institute’s own annual conference; the 2026 edition ran on 12–13 May in Madrid, billed as bringing together the entire cobalt and wider critical-minerals value chain.
The KOV open-pit copper-cobalt mine at Kolwezi. Its operator’s majority owner, Glencore, sits on the Institute’s Executive Committee.
Photo: Martin Tuchscherer, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
From a Guildford trade body to a Mayfair policy shop.
- 1957
A cobalt information body is founded in Brussels, according to the Union of International Associations yearbook. This Hub could not open a register confirming it, and reports it as the UIA’s claim rather than as established fact.
- 1991
COBALT DEVELOPMENT INSTITUTE is incorporated in England and Wales on 23 September, a company limited by guarantee, number 02647768.
- 2016
As the CDI, it files detailed technical objections to an EU proposal to restrict CMR substances including five cobalt salts in textiles, on letterhead from 18 Jeffries Passage, Guildford.
- 2017
The company changes its name to COBALT INSTITUTE on 20 September. Work with members on an industry assurance framework had begun earlier that year.
- 2019
Metalkol RTR is admitted as a member on 8 January, the announcement naming Eurasian Resources Group as its owner. CIRAF launches the next day, 9 January.
- 2021
The Institute updates its REACH dossiers for cobalt metal’s new harmonised classification, and joins the Fair Cobalt Alliance in December.
- 2022
On 20 June it grants CIRAF participants a hiatus on their annual public reporting requirement, citing the changing responsible-sourcing landscape and emerging mandatory due-diligence rules.
- 2023
Dinah McLeod becomes Director General in June.
- 2026
The Cobalt Congress runs in Madrid in May and the Cobalt Market Report 2025 is published the same month. Neither closes the CIRAF hiatus, and the report does not mention CIRAF at all.
CIRAF’s reporting obligation has been suspended since June 2022.
The Institute is an active company running a full policy and market-intelligence programme, and nothing here suggests otherwise. The finding worth publishing is narrower, and concerns CIRAF alone.
The CIRAF page is still live, still dated 20 June 2022, and still written in the present tense: the Institute “is granting a hiatus” to participants, “during this period of review”. Four years and three months later there is no closing note, no superseding update and no removal notice, and the named contact is still in post. A reader arriving at that page today would reasonably conclude the framework is between reporting cycles.
Meanwhile the Institute’s own flagship report has moved on. This Hub extracted the full text of the 77-page Cobalt Market Report 2025 and searched it: CIRAF appears zero times, as does its expanded name, glossary included. The same report gives responsible sourcing a full section and names five third-party frameworks as the operative mechanisms — IRMA, the Responsible Minerals Initiative, the Copper Mark, Towards Sustainable Mining, and the CCCMC’s Chinese due-diligence guidelines — alongside the Consolidated Mining Standard Initiative, which it describes as still under development. It reports third-party assessment covering 210,244 tonnes, or 78%, of global mined cobalt output across 180 assets in 2025, and 210,668 tonnes, or 88%, of refined output from 65 refinery assets.
So the Institute’s house publication treats other bodies’ schemes as the assurance that counts for cobalt, while the Institute’s website still hosts its own framework as merely paused. Both statements are the Institute’s own. This page sets them beside each other and draws no further conclusion: the Hub has put no question to the Institute, and has seen no statement from it that CIRAF has ended.
One caution on figures. The Institute tells the EU Transparency Register it represents “close to 70% of the world-wide production of cobalt”. That is its own wording in its own filing, and it is the only production-share figure it publishes anywhere — its current website makes no such claim. The same filing gives a head-office address the company left years ago, so the percentage should be read as a self-description of uncertain vintage rather than a current measurement.
Membership is recorded at operating-company level.
The Institute publishes its membership as logos, with no class labels and no stated total. Below are the members this Hub already holds as entities in its own record, and then the Executive Committee as the Institute’s own page marks it out.
The Institute lists members at operating-entity level. Its own announcement of 8 January 2019 admitted Metalkol RTR while describing Eurasian Resources Group as the facility’s owner; as at 20 September 2026 the members page carries no Metalkol, no Chambishi and no entry reading Eurasian Resources Group or ERG. Neither Chemaf nor Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt appears either. The page names no individual officeholders, so no governance role is asserted here from Executive Committee membership.
More of the bodies that speak for this sector.
The Cobalt Institute is one of several organisations shaping how cobalt is produced, audited and regulated. Browse the full register, or tell us what is missing.