Technology without coltan: this campaign wants you to stop having gadgets with the 'blood mineral'

The coltan is submerged in a war, and more and more groups are demanding that it stop being used in electronic devices.

Surely you do not know what coltan is, in which case you will not know one of the places where there is more: your house. And is that the coltan is one of the minerals most used at the time of manufacturing all kinds of electronic devices.

Its greatest use lies in batteries: your computer, your camera, your mobile ... most of them contain coltan. Also the lenses of almost all the cameras and video. Now you can imagine to what extent this material is essential in most of the technology you have at home.

Well, there are those who want to get rid of him, and it does not seem that the motives are banal. The NGO Alboan has launched a campaign to collect signatures so that this material is no longer so present in commercial battles within the European Union.

The reasons are varied, but there are two that stand out above the rest.

First ground: labor exploitation and pollution

The first is the difficulty to achieve it: currently, the Congo has about 80% of the coltan reserves worldwide, a situation that has led to a constant war between mafias to seize this mineral.

In addition, the use and treaty of coltan brings with it a systematic violation of human rights, since those who work with this mineral do so in conditions that many call work exploitation. In fact, sometimes children are even forced to participate in the collection of the mineral.

And, according to Alboan, "its extraction, processing and sale is controlled by armed groups that have turned the Congo into the worst hell, with more than five million dead since 1998, one million people displaced only in 2013 and more than one hundred thousand women raped a year. "

So, "those minerals 'stained with blood' are those that reach our hands hidden in our phones. Without being very aware of it, we contribute to finance the continuity of the exploitation of so many people in the mines and the maintenance of the armed groups that intervene in the conflicts ".

Second reason: nature

Second, coltan is a substance that harms-and very much-the environment. And it is not only highly polluting, but it is also a non-renewable and single-use material, with which its life cycle is much shorter than that of other materials that could be used instead.

According to Alboan, the ethical treatment of the coltan trade depends on the country in which you look. For the NGO, the United States is an example of the rejection of the war aroused around this material. And is that the Dodd-Frank Law regulates the trade of this mineral and is mandatory for all US companies that use it and listed on the Stock Exchange. Thanks to this, this law "has raised the level of awareness about the link between conflict and exploitation of minerals", in addition to "has shown that companies can make reasonable efforts to improve transparency in their supply chain."

In Europe, however, despite the fact that the European Commission made public an initiative to regulate the trade of coltan, later "the Member States were positioned in favor of limiting the scope of the law (by reducing the number of companies affected) and lowering the concept of 'corporate responsibility' as it appears in the OECD Guide. "

Thus, the objective of this campaign, in addition to collecting signatures, is for the European Union to abandon this commercial collaboration around coltan. In short, "prevent armed groups from continuing to finance minerals with legislation that requires manufacturers to use only those whose origin is clean, which do not come from conflicts in any part of the world and thus contribute to stop them."