The conflict mineral issue is providing a perfect storm for social change. It’s also leading electronics company CEOs to understand with great discomfort just how little they truly know about their supply chains.
It’s a situation where politics, commerce, and economics collide. And the resulting collision promises to create not only greater awareness about ethical sourcing but inflict more transparency than ever.
The headline on a riveting 2013 National Geographic article sums it best: “The Price of Precious: The minerals in our electronic devices have bankrolled unspeakable violence in the Congo.”
It’s one thing that the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a virtually landlocked central African nation surrounded on all sides by nine other countries and nearly half the size of the U.S., controls 34 percent of the world’s cobalt reserves, 10 percent of the world’s copper reserves, and 64 percent of the world’s coltan reserves.
It’s another that the biggest sources of four key minerals — specifically tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold — from which critical electronics components are made — have fallen into the hands of unruly foreign militia and tribal gangs, which sell the ore from which they are extracted.
According to the Enough Project, a Washington, D.C.-based human rights organization, these so-called “conflict minerals” are smuggled across the Congolese border into adjoining African countries like Uganda, where they are shipped to places like China, mixed with conflict-free minerals, and used in component assembly for electronics products.
While diplomatic efforts to bring political stability to the DRC have generally floundered over the past decade, sheer economic necessity (spurred by the ever-tightening grip of strict U.S. trade regulations) may be the breakthrough everyone’s been seeking. Some say the effort to force U.S. companies to disclose the origin of these minerals in their wiring, circuits, and assembly boards is a futile, if not misguided, exercise. Others believe those efforts alone could bring enough social and economic pressures to bear up and down the supply chain to eventually restore free markets for these minerals in the Congo and, in the process, stem horrific human rights abuses there.
The veritable explosion of smart phones has, in a sense, narrowly defined the conflict minerals issue. After all, without these four key minerals, the technology would have died on the vine long ago. Tantalum allows electricity to be stored efficiently in cell phones. Tungsten is the magic ingredient that makes them vibrate. Gold is used to coat wiring. And, of course, solder from tin is the “glue” that makes circuit boards.
Missing from that narrative is an even vaster universe of electronics ranging from aerospace components to life-saving medical devices like pacemakers, according to Scott Wilson, content solution strategist at market analyst IHS.
“Consumer electronics gets most of the publicity in the discussion about conflict minerals,” Wilson told My Purchasing Center. “But in reality, virtually anything that has an electronic component could contain one or more conflict minerals.” IHS markets a proprietary database detailing the ingredients of more than 400 million electronic components.
