By Celsias team
Posted on May 25, 2010. Listed in:
Blood Diamond wasn't just a bloody good movie. And the same sad story is being played out again, without Leonardo Di Caprio and friends, this time over the minerals which help power up our wired up lifestyle.
BusinessGreen.com has been talking to major buyers in the electronics world about what they are doing to stop the world's hunger for gadgets from feeding the warlords, and it sounds like there is encouraging news.
A coalition of businesses including some of the biggest names in the IT industry is preparing to launch a major crackdown on the use of "conflict minerals" sourced from unstable regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in electronic devices.
Speaking to BusinessGreen.com, Zoe McMahon, supply chain social and environmental responsibility manager at IT giant HP, revealed that a group of companies working under the banner of the Electronics Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC) is working on the finishing touches to a certification scheme that should help firms identify from which mines minerals and metals such as coltan, tin and tantalum have been sourced.
"We are going to introduce a scheme that will audit the metal process firms and identify those that have due diligence in place that can assure customers that they have not been mined from sources involved in the conflict in the DRC, " she said. "We have tested the processes with a number of tantalum smelters and are ready to move within the next six months."
The scheme will initially focus on excluding tantalum sourced from mines in conflict regions from the supply chain, although McMahon said that the EICC was committed to expanding the scheme to cover other metals and include environmental as well as humanitarian criteria in the certification standard.
The move follows several years of campaigning from NGOs who have accused the global IT and electronics industry of indirectly funding armed militias in DRC. They say the militias have used the income generated by the mines they have taken control of to fuel the long-running civil war that has resulted in countless human rights atrocities.
McMahon said it was notoriously difficult for large firms to exert influence on suppliers of raw materials, adding that ultimately conflict minerals can only be tackled by improvements in governance in the DRC and the emergence of a wide-ranging international agreement similar to the Kimberley Process certification that has led to the crackdown on the trade in conflict diamonds.
But she insisted that the EICC, which includes a host of global firms such as IBM, Philips, Sony, Dell and Intel as well as HP, was fully committed to enforcing its new standards and axing metal suppliers who handle conflict minerals. "We don't like to run away from suppliers – we prefer to help them drive improvements," she said. "But in this case it will be important for companies to stand by this policy and choose the right metal processing firms."
The news comes as the US Congress continues to debate a number of legislative proposals that would effectively ban the import of conflict minerals to the US.
Republican senator Sam Brownback and Democrats Dick Durbin and Russ Feingold introduced the Congo Conflict Minerals Act last year, calling for the US to step up efforts to stop the trade in conflict minerals.
Elements of the bill have since been included as an amendment to the US financial reform bill and if adopted, would "require annual disclosure by certain persons to the Securities and Exchange Commission if columbitetantalite, cassiterite, gold or wolframite from the Democratic Republic of Congo is used in their products".
Similar legislation was also proposed in the House of Representatives last November in the form of the Conflict Minerals Trade Act, which would require firms that import goods into the US to declare whether or not their products are conflict mineral-free.
