Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
90 per cent of eastern mines are controlled by militias, who employ threats,
intimidation, murder, rape and mutilation to enslave women and children
for work in the mines, then use the profi ts to buy weaponry. Over fi ve mil-
lion people have perished in the civil war over the past decade. Congolese
“confl ict” metals and minerals, such as coltan, are exported for smelting
in China then mixed with the overall global supply and sold on the inter-
national commodities market as tantalum, a core component in capacitors
that end up in phones, computers, games and media-production equipment.
The United Nations Security Council set up a Panel of Experts on the topic
and the U.S. Senate took up the issue in 2009 with its bipartisan S.891
Congo Confl ict Minerals Act (GeSI and EICC 2008, 56; Global Witness
2009; Montague 2002; Cox 2009, 21; Ma 2009; United Nations Panel of
Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms
of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo 2002).
1
Here's a picture of the cycle: consumer electronics rely on sixteen-year-
old girls who leave villages in northern China to work in what are ef ectively
indentured compounds run by Japanese, Taiwanese and U.S. businesses in
the south. They build computers, which are exported, used, discarded and
returned to China. Pre-teen Chinese girls pick away without protection at
these machines full of leaded glass in search of precious metals and dump
the remains in landfi lls. Another favoured destination is Nigeria, which
is estimated to receive two and a half million disused monitor segments
each year, full of the deadly lead that protects consumers from X-rays,
along with other dangerous elements. The vast majority of this machinery
no longer functions. It becomes a massive health hazard (Robinson 2009;
Nnorom et al. 2010).
2
This North-South asymmetry is changing as India and China generate
their own detritus. In terms of computer purchase, for example, see
Table
9.1
for the trends at mid-2011.
So-called emergent markets have startling e-waste implications in their
mimesis and expansion of Yanqui excess: India, for instance, rings in its new-
found wealth with eight to ten million new cell phone subscriptions a month,
drawing on diesel-fuelled power sources to compensate for the absence of a
and Forecast 2011 and 2012
Territory
2Q11 per cent Share
2011 per cent Share
2012 per cent Share
China
22.0
20.3
21.8
U.S.
21.0
20.6
19.6
Others
57.1
59.1
58.5
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