(Its impressive recycling robot, Liam, can disassemble used iPhones and harvest their parts.) But so far these projects are merely aspirational. Apple recently said it would like to end its reliance on mining altogether, and to its credit, it has experimented with solutions such as automated recycling. And if any company has serious resources to spare it’s Apple: It’s the most valuable enterprise in the world, with $256 billion in cash on hand. To effect real change, companies must dedicate serious resources and novel systems-thinking to the problem. The road from child-mined tin to an iPhone component is anything but direct and easy to police. They pool the ore they take from the mines and sell it to a middleman who in turn provides it to the smelter. At Cerro Rico, for example, underage miners work in what you might call freelance cooperatives. And it is undoubtedly true that establishing a clean, ethical supply chain is an enormous challenge. Of course, Apple isn’t alone in obtaining minerals from troubled mines and conflict zones. But it wasn’t until Sky News aired footage of children working in the Congolese mines this year that the company pledged to cut off the source. Apple mapped its cobalt supply chain and promised to clean it up. In 2016, the Washington Post revealed that “artisanal” mines in Congo, a prime source of cobalt for Apple and other companies, employed children and adults who dig by hand hundreds of feet into the earth for subsistence wages. However, by interviewing miners and tin industry analysts, I was able to link child labor-plagued Cerro Rico to a smelter Apple was still using in 2016 - clearly, third-party audits only go so far.Įvery other year or so, a new revelation of terrible mining conditions seems to send the company scrambling. (It had already cut off a number of them for noncompliance with its code of conduct). In 2016, it announced that 100% of its smelters had submitted to third-party audits for fair practices. In 2014, it declared its tantalum suppliers conflict-free. (The market for these substances funds warfare in and around the Democratic Republic of Congo.) Apple has complied. The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 requires companies to identify the smelters that supply them with four “conflict” minerals - tin, tantalum (.02% of the phone), tungsten (also. It’s unclear if conditions have changed much on Bangka, but according to its most recently published reports, Apple is still sourcing tin from the island’s mud pits. In 2014, after a BBC report about Bangka, Apple sent a task force accompanied by an environmental NGO to investigate. Miners there have been swallowed by landslides and collapsing pits six died in one week in 2012. For example, the mud pit mines on Indonesia’s Bangka Island, another source of tin for Apple, are arguably even deadlier than the Cerro Rico complex.
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