Responsible Cobalt Credits turn a company’s demand for responsible cobalt into investment at the mine site, directed by the people who work there. A book-and-claim mechanism created by the Fair Cobalt Alliance, now operated on a dedicated registry.
Read the FCA approachA Responsible Cobalt Credit represents one tonne of cobalt produced responsibly at a partner cooperative. A company calculates its cobalt footprint, buys credits to match it, and the premium flows back to the mine, where it pays for work in the four areas below.
A local, worker-led committee at the site decides where the premium goes, across four areas: health and safety, child rights, cooperative governance, and the environment.
The mechanism is deliberately mineral-agnostic. The first credits were purchased in 2023, and the model is now generalising beyond cobalt under the name Responsible Minerals Credits, with a public version of the standard expected in 2026 and copper next in line.
Four steps connect a tonne of responsibly mined cobalt to investment at the mine.
The committee allocates the premium across four areas, reported back to buyers.
Underground ventilation, protective equipment, safety ropes and waste management at the working site.
Funding that reinforces the wider child-labour remediation work in the surrounding community.
Stronger, fairer organisation of the cooperative that runs the site, so decisions hold over time.
Reducing the local environmental footprint of mining, from water to land rehabilitation.
In a book-and-claim scheme, a credit has to be issued once, held by exactly one party, and retired against a single buyer’s claim, with no possibility of the same tonne being counted twice. That takes dedicated infrastructure.
Oreka is the digital infrastructure built for it. Developed by Datastake and operated by The Impact Facility, the same organisation that runs the Fair Cobalt Alliance secretariat, Oreka is the registry for the Responsible Minerals Credits scheme: it tracks every certificate from issuance through to retirement, and produces a citable retirement statement a buyer can attach to a sustainability filing. State transitions are irreversible by system rule, so a retired credit can never be claimed again.
It runs on the open Datastake Application Framework. Oreka is live.
Volumes remain modest and early-stage: the mechanism is still at pilot scale. Reinvestment figures are reported by the Fair Cobalt Alliance and The Impact Facility.
The Fair Cobalt Alliance is founded in Kolwezi, with a financing mechanism for responsible artisanal cobalt among its goals.
The first Responsible Cobalt Credits are sold in August, alongside the launch of the Fairphone 5.
More than USD 34,000 is reinvested at the Kamilombe mine, directed by the site’s worker-led committee.
The model generalises into Responsible Minerals Credits, operated on the Oreka registry, with a public standard expected and copper next.
Responsible Cobalt Credits address a specific problem: artisanal and industrial cobalt are often mixed long before they reach a buyer, so perfect physical traceability is rarely possible. Book-and-claim, a model borrowed from renewable energy, lets companies fund responsible production now, transparently and at a known volume, rather than waiting for a chain of custody that may never exist.
It is still early. Volumes are small, the buyer base is still forming, and the public standard is not yet released. What has changed is the infrastructure: with Oreka, the scheme now has a registry that can issue, hold and retire credits at scale without double-counting.
Responsible Cobalt Credits are one of dozens of programmes shaping ASM cobalt. Browse the full register, or tell us what is missing.