Slashdot Mirror
Intel Challenges Manufacturers To Avoid "Conflict Metals"
retroworks writes "Several news outlets report on Intel's announcement that it will avoid purchases of rare earth minerals and metals, such as tantalum, sourced from high conflict areas such as the Congo basin. Could this lead to manufacturers stating the percentage of their boards which are made from recycled boards, like recycled paper greeting cards?"
Why did this get modded down? Tactlessly phrased or not, this AC has pretty much expressed what most of us feel - Who gives the least damn about "conflict metals" vs the price of their new tablet?
The only real problem with using raw materials from areas dominated by various tribal warlords comes from the risk of supply disruption. Anything else amounts to denying domesticated primates their reality-given right to treat each other like shit.
Intel recently stopped making motherboards
Hooray, activism works.
Seriously, simply by trying to avoid conflict minerals, they are already helping to stop fueling those regional wars. Does that make them "good guys"? It makes them "better than they were before." Which is a good thing.
Nobody's always perfect, so we should at least celebrate a little when someone improves.
John
These are the "conflict minerals" as described by Wikipedia:
Columbite-tantalite (coltan) - this is where tantalum comes from, which is used in compact and reliable capacitors across many industries, as well as a carbide in jet turbines, drills and other tools
Cassiterite - used to make tin, which is obviously used for tin cans and solder, as well as making fungicides, paints and PVC
Wolframite - used to make tungsten, used as a weight in a variety of applications, and as a carbide is used in similar applications to tantalum. Also has some limited use in electronics, such as cell phone vibrators
Gold - sees all sorts of usage in electronics and other applications in addition to its ancient usage as jewelry
First adopters of a new "method" like this may not have any economic benefits now, as they offset investment in R&D overheads etc. But in time with economies of scale it'll probably make for cheaper/quicker/easier production. They'll probably re-licence their conflict free production methods to other brands as social pressure grows and then that's where they'll likely make a profit. Money drives these things ultimately in big businesses even if it's being sold to the consumer with a warm fuzzy feeling of doing the right thing.
If it's anything like "conflict-free diamonds", it will find a pretty big niche among people who care more about feeling like they're helping and less about actually helping. For the most part, the only reliably conflict-free diamonds are lab created ones. Even Canadian diamonds have been traced as going back to pay African warlords.
Tactlessly phrased or not, this AC has pretty much expressed what most of us feel - Who gives the least damn about "conflict metals" vs the price of their new tablet?
I'm not saying you're wrong -- perhaps most of us do gladly suffer other people's misery if it knocks a few bucks off our retail price.
But I wonder if this would still be true if more of us were educated about the facts on the ground. It's easy to not care about distant people whom you've never met, or just absentmindedly heard about in the news.
To some extent this strategy of simply labeling, as in differentiating regular from "conflict" or "blood" sources, sort of worked out ok for diamonds. Not completely, of course, but it absolutely helps.
Majority or not, the complacent are a huge part of the problem.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
It appears the SEC. Has a rule requiring companies to audit their entire supply chain, for "Conflict Metals".
These supply line traceability audits would surely present a very high burden of compliance, and high costs, for this extra bureaucracy, even for a company like Intel.
Still...... Even if the company doesn't otherwise care where their metals come from, The SEC mandates independent third party supply chain traceability audits and reporting of audit information to the public and SEC and an annual conflict minerals report to the public, for manufacturers, and companies contracting an item to be manufactured.
Then there are..... companies who supply materials to the “issuers” (but are not themselves SEC-regulated) but who will almost certainly be required to conduct conflict minerals audits to meet the demands of those customers. Other estimates indicate that the total number of US companies likely impacted may exceed 12,000
To some extent this strategy of simply labeling, as in differentiating regular from "conflict" or "blood" sources, sort of worked out ok for diamonds. Not completely, of course, but it absolutely helps.
There's a bit of a difference between blood diamonds and blood capacitors. You don't actually need diamonds for anything. Industrial diamonds (which you actually use for useful purposes) are cheap and easy to get, since they're incredibly small (basically diamond dust). The larger ones have no practical uses; they're only used for jewelry. So if you want to avoid fueling tribal warlords, it's easy: you don't buy diamonds, and instead buy something else like cubic zirconia, Swarovski crystals, or other gemstones like sapphires, rubies, emeralds, etc. (many of which are now artificially-created anyway).
Tantalum isn't used for jewelry, it's used for capacitors. Not only that, it's used for extremely high-performance capacitors. So you could stop using it, and switch to other types of capacitors, but you're probably going to suffer for it somehow, because AFAIK nothing else can match the volumetric efficiency of tantalum at this time. You could switch to standard electrolytics, but those don't really fit into smartphones and iPads. You could switch to multilayer ceramics, but those probably won't give you the required capacitance, so you'll have to use lots of them, so your smartphone will need to be 50% larger.
It's the same problem we have with oil; we can't easily switch to something else, or do without, without severely affecting our technology and quality-of-life, so we fuel conflicts in certain parts of the world which happen to be rich in that natural resource.
Tantalum is rare, and it is a conflict metal, but it is not a rare earth metal. Nor does TFA claim that.
This is all being driven by a 2010 US Law requiring companies to track and disclose where they acquire gold, tantalum, tin and tungsten. These are primarily mined in the Congo region, and are believed to be run by warlords using the public as basically slave labor.
While a good in principle law, it doesn't currently list "bad" suppliers, and really doesn't do anything but make companies track their suppliers. No penalty for buying from the worst of the worst, you just have to report it. And the "worst of the worst"? They're not stupid - they're reverting to well thought out money laundering techniques to hide their product behind "clean" companies.
So this ends up being another needless law that requires companies to to extensive work reporting something that the bad guys have already found a way around.
www.christopherlewis.com
In a world where companies rarely go all-in on something new, isn't partially better than the only other practical alternative of not at all? Besides, it's almost impossible to be 100% ethical in every single thing you do, as you'll quickly find your bottom line nickled and dimed away.
True, but I don't see how that is an argument against being informed about it. The quality of life we stand to lose for having suboptimal capacitors is trivial, even embarassing, compared to the potential gain in quality of life for some of the people at the other end. And my main point was, I think this labelling is a good idea because then at least we can't claim ignorance.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
So...it's OK for people to suffer because: "My phone might be 2mm thicker if they don't"
No sig today...
Exactly.
There has been a long campaign to convince people that you shouldn't sell them on.
Why? Because they are virtually indestructible. There must be enough diamond jewellery out there for everyone by now....
Also, if you're uncertain that tantalum is so essential for your electronic lifestyle that suffering in war torn areas is irrelevant, it's good to know there are no wars in Australia. They're the world's major supplier of tantalum. Avoiding "blood tantalum" really is a matter of "sanitizing" your supply chain.
Fairphone, http://www.fairphone.com/
And, the specs go much beyond just avoiding 'conflict metals'. For instance, the battery is replaceable, and there are two SIM slots that make the phone much more interesting to reuse in developing countries when you'll be tired of it.
And, they considered a lot of 20000, then sold them all, then extended to 25000, then sold them all again.
So, things are going well for them.
(I'm patiently waiting for them to become compatible with the open-source Sailfish OS, and then will be ready to pay twice the current cost.)
Herve S.
Why did this get modded down? Tactlessly phrased or not, this AC has pretty much expressed what most of us feel - Who gives the least damn about "conflict metals" vs the price of their new tablet?
As much as I'm deeply-not-outraged by AC, there is a distinction to be made: Everyone operates under what might be called 'moral myopia': things closer to them(either literally geographically closer, or socially/in-their-living-room-by-TV/etc.) affect them more, more distant things affect them less. This is just how humans are specced. Plus, if it didn't work that way, the utterly incomprehensible scale of continual human tragedy worldwide would probably reduce us to nonfuctional, catatonic shells.
Given that a mostly-landlocked war in the relatively hostile environment of central Africa is about as far from most of us as anything can be (some locations are more distant as-the-crow-flies; but handy services like 'roads' and 'airports' and 'enough bars and hotels to attract foreign journalists' don't really exist, so the area barely even gets written about or filmed), it's entirely to be expected that what goes on there would have vanishingly low moral salience for us.
However, people who tediously go on about just how much they don't care, and how these supply chain policies are total regulatory bullshit, and so on, aren't psychologically distant from the situation. (They are in fact more engaged with it than those who know little and say less, or even some slactivist petition-signers). They actually don't give a fuck, and overtly support corporate supply chain convenience and incrementally cheaper gizmos made possible by a brutal slow-burn conflict substantially driven and financed by access to mineral resources in the area. That point of view is pretty fucked up.
(Now, one accusation that is probably valid is that Intel is being slightly sneaky here: Intel makes a comparatively small quantity (particularly by mass) of mostly-very-high-margin products. Their products do require a number of esoteric materials, and they probably could be making some greater amount of money if they just held their nose and went with the lowest bidder in all cases; but in terms of 'dollars in profit per gram of Tantalum used' Intel probably crushes almost everybody else, certainly the board-stuffers at Foxconn buying capacitors by the containerload to assemble boards, or the guys at Vishay making-it-up-in-volume actually manufacturing tantalum and tantalum-doped ceramic capacitors. Intel can probably afford to be pickier than many other players.)
See the post just below this by Curunir_wolf. The same argument you're making for China can be made for these conflict areas. The PLA ain't morally any superior to African warlords
In fact I would think if the market dried up, the warlords would just move their slaves to performing other tasks, and working them even harder since there's now less money overall to fight over. In other words it makes everyone worse off.
So your premise is that if slavery is less profitable, there will be more of it? I am not sure how your theory works. If we remove all the profit, will there be an infinite amount? I have never seen the Lump of Labor Fallacy applied to slavery before, but it seems just as nonsensical.