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'Blood Cell Phones' Fuel War, Crime and Human Rights Abuses

Analysis by Clark Boyd
Fri Jul 30, 2010 12:20 PM ET
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This month, my colleagues have been giving you a glimpse of what the end of the life cycle often looks like for electronic equipment like cell phones, mp3 players, and old hard drives and monitors. It can make for grim reading. There are e-waste recyclers who don't actually recycle, and there's the fact that much of this stuff ends up in the developing world, where people often risk their health (and their lives) in pursuit of a few pennies' worth of material to sell.

Well, I thought I'd take this opportunity to tell you about the beginning of the electronics life cycle, which, quite frankly, can be just as grim. The picture above was taken at the Bisle mine in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo. This man is mining cassiterite, an ore that's used to make tin. Tin is used to solder circuit boards. You can imagine how many circuit boards get soldered each year.

Watchdog groups such as Global Witness say that the demand for cassiterite and other so-called "conflict minerals," is fueling war, crime, and human rights abuses in this part of the world. Just like we have "blood diamonds," people are now talking about "blood cell phones."

So, who you gonna call in to address the problem? Why, the U.S. Congress of course. A provision in the recently passed (and signed) legislation on financial reform calls on tech companies to disclose when the minerals used to create their products come from Congo or neighboring countries.

For activist groups and concerned consumers, it's a start. Mike Davis of Global Witness recently did an interview with The World, a public radio news program (yep, it's my day job), that scrutiny and transparency "can go a long way to address the problem" of conflict minerals, but that scrutiny and transparency "need to be backed up by enforcement."

For companies, it's not easy to do the kind of supply-chain checks needed to ensure that the minerals they're using aren't funding arms groups. Companies use minerals mined from all over the world, and in many instances, Mike Loch of Motorola told our program, "there's no means to reliably trace minerals to their mine of origin."

And, he said, he would hate to see this new bill shut down all mining in Congo. "They need that mining for their livelihood."

Loch said that stopping the flow of conflict minerals is like "stopping the flow of water in a river. You have to build the dam all the way across." And that, he said, means that all participants in the process -- from mine, to smelter to manufacturer -- all going to have to play an active part.

What about you, dear reader? Would you be more willing to buy a cell phone that had a label marked "made with conflict free minerals?" Would you be willing to pay a bit more for that?

Credit: Mike Craemer, courtesy of Global Witness