It’s always fun to see documentaries that trace everyday objects back to their origins. Usually those films are about bread or maybe books; one comes from wheat, the other from the forest. We get a nice line to follow and are given the option of keeping our hunter-gatherer ancestry in sight. (well, sort of)
I’m always baffled (well, again, sort of) when it turns out that the apples I’m looking at in a store have been shipped across the globe. It just doesn’t make sense to me. And if you try to track down the components and resources of high-tech stuff, you’ve got a lifetime of tracking ahead of you.
Take the example of tantalum, a metal powder extracted from coltan ore, and a required part of cellphones, computers and airplanes. It’s a rare resource: Prices are high and the supply is low. Market forces at work here, people. And those forces are at the moment, to put it gently, bum-raping the people of Congo where there’s a huge deposit of coltan ore.
You have a bunch of rebel groups fueling their civil war by selling the ore to refineries that in turn sell this to high-tech companies (Apple? oh, Apple i though you were a cool company! This shit aint cool! Not cool, y’hear?) and in the process killing people (or enslaving them to work in mines), destroying animal habitat (killing gorillas – your cellphone is killing cute baby gorillas) and generally making a muck of things and adding some more bad to an already quite baddish world.
What to do what to do? I love the quote from Outi Mikkonen at Nokia, when asked how they check up on their suppliers if their tantalum comes from Congo: “All you can do is ask, and if they say no, we believe it.”
Yes, because we all know that Nokia just doesn’t have the resources necessary to check up on the supply chain.
I don’t know what to do, but at least I feel i should know where my stuff comes from. A good place to start on that is here: www.globalissues.org