Mining is only a piece of the puzzle, but it is dirty for all industries, and many industries employ or buy from mines with questionable practices and human rights records. In many cases, the issue is that the materials and thus the mines are in undeveloped countries, or countries that are looking for money over treating their populace properly. Think/research stuff like blood diamonds.

What makes these mines dirty is the lack of regulation, so companies are free to run it as dangerously and cheaply as possible at the expense of environmental impacts and human suffering. These mines, usually in countries with questionable to terrible records, are not controlled by the developed countries who need those resources. An example is if America told China to clean up it's mining. China would laugh at America, who has no jurisdiction or path for reprisal, and continue to do as it pleased. There simply is no reasonable way to force a mine in another country to clean up.

That's why it is insanely important to research and develop recycling, and to enact incentives for it at the government level. Since we cannot clean up the mining in other countries, and we cannot legally, or reasonably force a company in our own country to source from more expensive but cleaner sources, we need to try a different approach. If you can recover 85% of rare materials from existing batteries/items inside our country, that is 85% less you need to source from the terrible mine in the Congo. The trick is incentivizing companies to use the recycled materials, or to develop processes to make the recycling processes cheaper and that way you can sell the recycled materials for competitive prices. Look up how incentivizing recycling of Lead Acid batteries got us to something like 97% recycle rate.