Tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold.
All of these minerals are found in our electronics and
in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which contains
an estimated $24 trillion in untapped mineral
resources. Yet the DRC remains one of the poorest
and most dangerous countries in the world.
And mining these four metals can help fund armed
conflict in the region.
The mining potential of this country is just beyond
imaginable, and yet you have poverty at the highest
levels.
With the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010, U.S.
companies are required to disclose their use of
conflict minerals. This has led to greater awareness and
some important reforms.
But today, consumers still can't be sure if the
minerals in their electronics are fully
conflict-free or if the mines where they originate
are dangerous, environmentally destructive,
or use child labor.
You can't actually ascertain whether my phone, the
capacitor that is powering it, is not from conflict
minerals. The whole process is muddied.
That's largely because in the DRC and surrounding
countries, hundreds of thousands work in the
informal mining sector, toiling away using hand
tools in what's known as artisanal and small-scale
mines. This type of mining can be hazardous and very
difficult to regulate, but it's also one of the few
sources of income available to some of the world's
poorest men and women.
And on the flip side, you have the international
market that has these perfect standards, and
consumers as well.
And increasingly, they want perfect environmental
conditions, gender equality and anti-corruption and this
and that. They want the perfect package, but that's
not the situation on the ground. That's not even the
situation in our own communities.
The largest companies in the world, including Apple,
Microsoft, Intel, and Tesla, put out extensive
conflict minerals reports every year, usually stating
that there is no reason to believe that the minerals
that they source help to support armed groups.
But corruption and instability at mine sites
means that there are never any guarantees.
Apple, Intel, and Tesla did not reply to requests for
comment, while a Microsoft spokesperson stated:
"Microsoft remains committed to responsible and
ethical sourcing and takes this issue very seriously."
The four conflict minerals, tin, tantalum, tungsten, and
gold are used widely in consumer electronics.
In a smartphone for example, tin is used to
solder metal components together while tantalum,
which is extracted from the metallic ore coltan, is used
in capacitors, which store electrical energy.
Tungsten is used in the components that make a phone
vibrate and gold is used in circuit board connectors.
Only 2% of the world's tin, tungsten, and gold comes
from the DRC and surrounding countries, so
mining these minerals doesn't usually help to fund
armed conflict. But 67% of the world's tantalum comes
from the DRC and Rwanda.
And the eastern DRC, where a large percent of these
minerals are found, is mired in violence stemming
from tensions between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic
groups. After the Second Congo War ended in 2003, a
transitional government was unable to contain armed
groups who perpetrated violence against civilians,
thus giving rise to self-defense militias.
Today, rampant poverty, corruption, and
institutional chaos continues to drive many
Congolese to join one of the over 120 armed groups
operating in the eastern DRC.
Before the artisanal miners can access the coltan mine
and some places, they have to pay taxes to the armed
groups, because the government is not there to
provide security to them.
Beyond taxation, these groups will fully take over
some mines, either extracting the ore
themselves or using forced labor, purchasing arms with
the proceeds. And beyond the potential for funding
conflict, conditions in artisanal mines can be quite
dangerous.
I think in the past four or five years, every year we've
had people who've been buried underground.
I think the latest was like over 30 people in Kamituga.
It is a very dangerous job, both from a security side,
from a financial stability side, from a health and
safety side.
Such conditions also apply to other minerals found in
the DRC, like cobalt, which is surging in demand due to
its importance in EV batteries. The majority of
the world's cobalt is mined in the relatively safer
southern DRC and is not benefiting armed groups.
Yet concerns over working conditions and the use of
child labor in artisanal cobalt mines remain.
With cobalt and the DRC, if you are a large-scale buyer
for the battery supply chain, it is challenging to
not buy DRC material, because the DRC represents
about three quarters of annual supply globally.
For the last decade or so, African countries,
intergovernmental organizations, and companies
alike have ramped up efforts to better trace and
clean up mineral supply chains.
African states started to work very closely with the
OECD around 2010 to make sure that the expectations,
the standards, the certification mechanism that
was being developed in region would align with and
complement the initiatives that were coming out of the
international community, in terms of expectations of the
private sector.
If you're a big company, you're a name brand, you
know you're consumer facing, you can easily spend
a million on this. And the big brands that we all know,
they would spend a lot more.
This has given rise to a web of organizations working to
trace and verify supply chains.
For example, Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, Intel,
Samsung and hundreds of others are members of the
Responsible Minerals Initiative, which maintains
a list of smelters and refiners that have undergone
an independent audit to ensure that they're sourcing
responsibly. In its most recent conflict minerals
report, Apple says that it has removed 163 smelters and
refiners from its supply chain since 2009, including
12 in 2021.
Then there are the organizations actually doing
on the ground tracing and due diligence at mine sites.
ITSCI is the main player in the DRC and surrounding
region, working in over 2,000 mines.
A company located downstream in a supply chain, of
course, and even a smelter, let's say upstream, located
abroad, will not have the capacity to visit all of
these mines to assess the conditions at the sites, to
verify information and to correct risks.
And this is exactly what the role of ITSCI is.
ITSCI trains government agents to tag and seal bags
that come from registered mines.
But no system is foolproof, and if agents are corrupt,
they might accept minerals from outside unregistered
mines and tag them anyway.
Agents were actually selling the tags to other mines.
And even when the system was working, those minerals
were melted with the minerals from other mines
from which we don't know where it was coming from.
Ultimately, it's just really hard to stop bad actors in
the system. But experts say the answer is not boycotting
minerals from the DRC or from artisanal and
small-scale mines overall.
Recognizing the importance of artisanal mining and
decriminalizing and legitimating that work.
If we recognize, for example, that artisanal
mining is the most important rural, non-farming
activity, employing tens of millions throughout Africa,
generally 30 to 40% of which are women, making sure
that we're decriminalizing that and recognizing it as
legitimate is the first step to supporting them.
Disengagement, Lebert says, would just lead to greater
poverty and thus more instability in the region
overall, making it even harder for mines to meet
international standards, something many companies
also recognize. In Tesla's most recent conflict
minerals report they state: As recommended by the OECD,
we do not support an embargo, implicit or
explicit, of any DRC material, but instead allow
sourcing from the region when it can be done in a
responsible manner through audited value chains.
Overall though, Lebert says that individual companies
need to be doing more to monitor risks on an ongoing
basis and independently verify what third-party
auditors and tracing schemes are telling them.
The trend has been an over-reliance on industry
scheme, because companies for the most part want it to
be as easy and as simple as possible.
They want to outsource the due diligence to somebody
else and not worry about it and for it not to be a
headache, but at the same time to protect themselves
reputationally.
Though there's much work to be done, many do agree that
international standards and corporate efforts have led
to gradually improving conditions. But moving
forward, getting all countries on the same page
when it comes to the ethical sourcing of conflict
minerals and cobalt is key.
What's also very important is how much the Chinese
companies are going to play by the same rules than
Western companies, because so far, nine of the 14
biggest companies in the Katanga, where the cobalt
is, are Chinese or owned by Chinese.
So it really has to be like a worldwide scheme where
everyone agrees with the rules.
Unlike the U.S. and the EU, China does not have
enforceable due diligence guidelines.
And while compulsory standards would certainly
add pressure for mines to clean up their act and help
cut off the market for unethically sourced
minerals, lasting change will likely only come when
the DRC itself stabilizes.
The first thing that needs to take place is that the
government must create a stable environment.
Whether it's going to be by political negotiation or
outright military operation, they need to
really ensure that the activities of the armed
groups is brought to the barest minimum.
But that won't happen overnight.
Ultimately, the conditions that we see on the ground or
the human rights issues that are of concern to us
all are very much linked to governance, poverty.
And we need to get at these more systemic issues if you
want to see lasting changes in supply chains, not just
de-risking in the short or medium term for a company's
benefit.