Eén van de meest integrere journalisten die ik ken is George Monbiot. Hij is een onderzoeksjournalist, die met weloverwogen artikelen zijn mening over duurzaamheid, diversiteit, mvo en klimaatverandering niet onder stoelen of banken steekt. Monbiot schrijft voor
The Guardian.
Onderstaande blog wilde ik jullie niet onthouden. Het is in het Engels, maar ik ga ervan uit dat dat voor de meesten geen probleem is. Mombiot gaat op zoek naar een 'faire' smartphone, waarvan de componenten niet met bloed zijn gewonnen.
Overigens: het is een misser van Vodafone dat de website naar de ecoscore niet werkte. In Nederland werkt hij wel:
http://over.vodafone.nl/duurzaam/handige-tips-tools/eco-score/de-eco-score-toegelicht
De conclusie van Monbiot: Nokia is voorlopig de beste optie, totdat de smartphone van
Fairphone wordt geïntroduceerd.
Toch maar eens op zoek gaan naar een echte, faire telefoon?
Smart Phones, Dumb Companies
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 12th March 2013
If you are too well connected, you stop thinking. The clamour, the
immediacy, the tendency to absorb other people’s thoughts, interrupt the
deep abstraction required to find your own way. This is one of the
reasons why I have not yet bought a smartphone.
But the technology is becoming ever harder to resist. Perhaps this
year I will have to succumb. So I have asked a simple question: can I
buy an ethical smartphone?
There are dozens of issues, such as starvation wages, bullying, abuse
and 60-hour weeks in the sweatshops manufacturing them, the debt
bondage into which some of the workers are pressed, the energy used, the
hazardous waste produced. But I will concentrate on just one: are the
components soaked in the blood of people from the eastern Democratic
Republic of Congo? For 17 years, rival armies and militias have been
fighting over the region’s minerals. Among them are metals critical to
the manufacture of electronic gadgets, without which no smartphone would
exist: tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold.
While these elements are by no means the only reason for conflict
there, they help to fund it, supporting a fragmented war that – through
direct killings, displacement, disease and malnutrition – has now killed
several million people. Rival armies have forced local people to dig in
extremely dangerous conditions, have extorted minerals and money from
self-employed miners, have tortured, mutilated and murdered those who
don’t comply and have spread terror and violence – including gang rape
and child abduction – through the rest of the population(1,2). I do not
want to participate.
None of the campaigning groups wants companies to stop buying
minerals from eastern Congo. Global Witness and FairPhone, for example,
point out that mining supports many families in a country where 82% are
considered underemployed(3). But they also insist that the trade can be
dissociated from violence: if, and only if, companies ensure they’re not
buying minerals which have passed through the hands of militias. Given
the potential damage to their reputations, you might have expected these
firms to take the issue seriously. With a few exceptions, you would be
wrong.
I began with the retailers, and the results were disappointing.
Vodafone, for example, claims to have developed a social and ecological
rating system, enabling its customers “to make informed decisions about
the mobile phone they choose to buy.”(4) Its website says this system
“was launched in the Netherlands in 2011 and will be introduced to other
European markets in 2012.” But all you get when you click on the link
is “page not found”(5). In Dutch. As for its claim that an ethical score
“is displayed next to the product, whether you are buying online or in
store”(6), I have been unable to find any such scores on its UK site.
O2 says “we want to share information about the social and
environmental impact of the products we sell, to help customers make the
right decisions.”(7) Click on the link and what do you get? A list of
its monthly tariffs(8). It does provide eco-ratings beside its phones,
but the scores are unexplained, so we can’t see which issues are taken
into account.
Of the manufacturers, Nokia appears to have gone furthest, and its
efforts are quite impressive. Since 2001 – long before most other
companies began to take an interest – it has tried to remove
illegally-mined tantalum from its supply-chain(9). It now instructs its
suppliers to map the routes these metals take before they reach the
company. The problem is far from solved: it tells me that “there has
been no credible system in the electronics industry that allows a
company to determine the source of their material”. There are now six
initiatives by governments, voluntary groups and companies to try to get
the blood out of mobile phones, and Nokia is involved in all of
them(10).
Apple’s response was less detailed and less persuasive. To give you
an idea of how complex the problem has become, it has discovered that
its metals are supplied by 211 smelters, liberally distributed around
the planet(11). Any of them could be using minerals seized by militias
in Congo. But the fact that it has mapped its own supply chain is a good
sign.
Two years ago Motorola launched a scheme – which looks credible –
whose purpose is to buy conflict-free tantalum from eastern Congo(12).
Projects of this kind, which start at the beginning of the long chain of
suppliers, provide an income for local people, while guaranteeing that
armed psychopaths have not profited from the sale of your phone. It’s
hard to see why all the manufacturers can’t join it.
Other companies, hiding behind their trade associations, have done
all they can to undermine these efforts. Two months ago a new provision
of the US Dodd Frank Act, which obliges companies to discover whether
the minerals they buy from Congo are funding armed groups, came into
force. It should have happened before, but it was delayed for 16 months
by corporate lobbyists. Thanks to their efforts, and after 17 years of
ignoring the issue, companies will still be allowed to dodge their duty
for another two years, by stating that they don’t know where the
minerals come from.
Even this was not enough for them. Three corporate lobby groups – the
National Association of Manufacturers, the US Chamber of Commerce and
the Business Roundtable – are now sueing the US government to have the
new law set aside(13). Global Witness has called on some of their
members – including Caterpillar, Dell, Honeywell, Motorola, Siemens,
Toyota, Whirlpool and Xerox – to publicly distance themselves from the
lawsuit, without success.
It suspects that some firms are “using the anonymity provided by the
industry associations to try to weaken the law” while making public
statements about how ethical they are. I ran out of time to pursue this
question, but perhaps we could crowdsource it. Let’s contact the phone
manufacturers to discover whether they belong to these lobby groups, and
ask whether they will publicly denounce the lawsuit and suspend their
membership until it is dropped. That would be a good test of where they
really stand.
I haven’t yet made a decision. There are all the other issues to
investigate, including the remarkably short life of these phones (a
twitter poll I conducted suggests that most people replace them after
between one and four years). Perhaps I will wait until FairPhone
manufactures a handset(14). Or perhaps I won’t bother. I might resign
myself to less immediacy, less accessibility and a little more space in
which to think.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Global Witness, 2009. “Faced with a gun, what can you do?”: war
and the militarisation of mining in Eastern Congo.
http://www.globalwitness.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/report_en_final_0.pdf
2. http://www.raisehopeforcongo.org/content/initiatives/conflict-minerals
3. See also Testimony by Mvemba Phezo Dizolele, 10th May 2012.
http://financialservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hhrg-112-ba20-wstate-mdizolele-20120510.pdf
4. http://www.vodafone.com/content/index/about/sustainability/eco-rating.html
5. http://over.vodafone.nl/duurzaam/klant-control/eco-score
6. http://www.vodafone.com/content/index/about/sustainability/eco-rating.html
7. http://www.o2.co.uk/thinkbig/planet/sustainableproducts/ecorating
8. http://www.o2.co.uk/tariffs/paymonthly
9. http://www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/people-and-planet/supply-chain/supply-chain/
10. The Global e-Sustainability Initiative, the Electronics Industry
Citizenship Coalition, the OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible
Supply Chains of Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas,
the Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade, Solutions
for Hope and the Conflict Free Smelter assessment programme.
11. http://www.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/labor-and-human-rights.html
12. http://solutions-network.org/site-solutionsforhope/
13. http://www.globalwitness.org/library/companies-must-come-clean-conflict-minerals-lawsuit
14. http://www.fairphone.com/
De wereld van 3D print is fascinerend. Het aantal mogelijkheden groeit van dag tot dag en de techniek opent deuren naar geheel nieuwe businessmodellen. 
Veel zakelijke gebruikers komen in hun werk in aanraking met energie, maar weten eigenlijk niet waarop ze bij dit onderwerp moeten letten. De 
