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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.
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
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.
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
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.)