Abstract: China's cobalt resources are extremely scarce and rely heavily on imports. The prominent contradiction between supply and demand has become the key to restrict the development of China's cobalt industry. The development of recovery and utilization technology of cobalt-containing secondary resources is of great significance to alleviate the contradiction between supply and demand. This paper summarizes the distribution and reserves of cobalt mineral resources, introduces the sources and types of cobalt secondary resources, and focuses on the secondary resources such as cobalt-bearing metallurgical slag, waste alloy, hydrogenation catalyst and waste battery as the main object. the recovery and utilization potential and related technologies of cobalt in cobalt-containing secondary resources are described in detail. The results show that at present, the secondary resources containing cobalt are usually recovered and reused by wet leaching technology, in which the efficient separation of cobalt from impurity elements in the leaching solution containing cobalt is the key link for the recovery of cobalt. Therefore, the development of the system and process of selective leaching and extraction of cobalt is the core to improve the utilization rate of secondary resources containing cobalt.