Standing beside a rutted red dirt road at about 5,000 feet up in
the jungled mountains of northern Rwanda, Intel’s Adam Schafer
explains in four words why he and a teammate had traveled from
Oregon to this especially remote part of Central Africa.
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A worker inside a tin mine run by the
Comikagi cooperative, near Nyamugali, Rwanda. A team from Intel's
Responsible Minerals Program, as well as representatives of other
tech firms, visited mineral-rich Rwanda in November 2019 as part of
an industry effort to ensure a legal and ethical supply chain. Tin,
tantalum, tungsten and gold mined in the Central African country
are key components of silicon chips that run today's smartphones,
laptops, servers and other high-tech gear. (Credit: Walden
Kirsch/Intel Corporation)
“We’re here to learn.”
With banana trees swaying behind him, Schafer continues: “Our
goal is to protect the people and the planet, both of which help us
produce our products. We want to meet the responsible sourcing
expectations of our customers, shareholders and employees.”
Schafer is Intel’s director of Supply Chain Sustainability. Late
last year, he and Erin Mitchell, manager of Intel’s Responsible
Minerals Program, spent a week crisscrossing Rwanda’s mineral-rich
mountains — fording creeks in a four-wheel drive, scrambling down
narrow mountain trails to mine entrances and asking questions at
every turn.
Why Rwanda? The minerals — tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold
(known as 3TG) — that lie both deep underground and right on the
surface in this part of Africa are essential to the worldwide
silicon manufacturing industry.
In chip manufacturing, for example, tantalum is a metal uniquely
well-suited as a diffusion barrier on advanced copper
interconnects. In the assembly/test process, tin offers a low
melting point and is a key component of the solder that attaches
silicon chips to their packaging. Gold is corrosion-resistant and
an excellent electrical conductor for the tiny pins that connect
chips to other components.
On behalf of Intel, Schafer and Mitchell made the trip to fully
understand the first part of a complex process. It begins with a
chunk of mineral ore in Africa and — after passing through many
hands, including miners, refiners, smelters and sellers, scattered
across the globe — eventually winds up in chip factories.
Ultimately, it turns up in your computer, your tablet, your
smartphone, as well as in the millions of servers that run the
internet and likely are delivering this story to you.
More: Intel Leaders Travel to Africa to Track Responsibly
Sourced Minerals (YouTube Video) | Intel Tracks Responsibly Sourced
Minerals (B-Roll Video) | Intel Launches First Global Challenges,
Marks a New Era of Shared Corporate Responsibility (News Release) |
Closing Out a Decade of Corporate Responsibility Accomplishments
and Creating Greater Impact for the Next Decade (Suzanne Fallender
Editorial)
The Intel team’s fact-finding trip was completed before the
coronavirus pandemic halted most air travel — but helped guide
Intel’s recently announced 2030 Corporate Responsibility Goals as
they relate to responsible sourcing.
In continued successful pursuit of Moore’s Law – as well as
achieving these new 2030 goals – Intel recognizes this: Ethical
mineral sourcing throughout the supply chain is no less important
than process and technology innovation.
An effort that began with ‘conflict minerals’
More than 10 years ago, Intel recognized that some of its
mineral purchases — through a complex web of supply chain
intermediaries — were unintentionally contributing to human rights
abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Armed guerilla factions
in that country were exploiting forced labor, often abusing
children and women, and engaging in multiple human rights
violations — all in pursuit of illicit profits from the global
mineral trade.
This is how the 3TG minerals — when extracted from the Earth
under these abusive conditions — came to be called “conflict
minerals.” The minerals themselves are not an issue.
At the time, Intel analyzed its supply chain and began a
multiyear, industrywide effort to root out human rights abuses from
the mineral components in its own products and those of other tech
companies.
The 2010 U.S. Dodd-Frank Act, which Intel supported, required
companies to disclose if any of their 3TG minerals are sourced from
the Congo or neighboring countries. That was the same year the U.N.
reported a grim statistic: In the Congo’s mineral-rich Kivu
provinces, “almost every mining deposit was controlled by a
military group.”
Since 2010, much has changed.
At the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show, then-Intel CEO Brian
Krzanich announced on his keynote stage a milestone that took many
observers by surprise. Going forward, all of the company’s new
processors would be sourced from minerals that are
“conflict-free.”
Other technology companies also joined the conflict-free effort,
along with nongovernmental organizations, as part of the
Responsible Minerals Initiative.
The International Peace Information Service reported that by
2016, 79% of miners in eastern Congo said they were working in
mines where no armed groups were involved.
From conflict-free to responsible sourcing
Schafer and Mitchell’s mine scouting work last December in
Rwanda — Schafer also visited mines in the Congo, and Mitchell
visited smelters in India — was a sign that Intel, along with key
tech industry leaders, are further raising the bar.
Intel and its partners are moving beyond the issue of conflict
minerals to the broader and loftier goal of achieving “responsible
sourcing.”
“Intel came off to a very strong start in the conflict minerals
space, and we were a very early leader,” explains Mitchell during
one mine visit. “We want to take that leadership we had early on
and expand on it.”
So now, Schafer and Mitchell, along with others across Intel’s
global supply chain organization, are asking questions such as: Are
mining conditions sustainable and ethical? Are miners’ human rights
respected? Is the raw mineral ore that enters the supply chain
carefully traced so that buyers can be assured it was mined and
sold legally, free of human rights abuses?
Tracing minerals is not trivial
Schafer and Mitchell visited six mines and refining facilities
over five days, heading out each morning from the capital city of
Kigali with a local driver familiar with the bone-rattling unpaved
mountain roads that snake up to most of the country’s underground
mines.
At Rutongo Mines, the two stood at the entrance to a horizontal
mine shaft as workers in black rubber boots and bright yellow hard
hats emerged from the darkness, grinning at their visitors while
muscling a narrow-gauge rail cart full of tin ore into the bright
nearly equatorial sun. There, the Intel team learned that the mine
operator is facing competition to his business of an odd kind.
He says townspeople with picks and shovels sneak onto his
company’s sprawling multi-thousand-acre mountain mining claim. In
broad daylight — until they’re chased away — they dig into the
mountainsides for chunks of tin ore, called cassiterite. Then they
sell the ore to street buyers in the capital city of Kigali,
undercutting the legal business. And who knows if that
ore-on-the-street was responsibly sourced? Or if it came from rogue
players?
To ensure responsible sourcing, label and log
everything
The industry answer is a “bag-and-tag” system. Intel and other
tech companies have been successfully pushing for a process that
tracks bags of mineral ore with crimped-on, tamper-resistant tags.
Bag-and-tag ensures that minerals come from responsible sources —
in much the same way you trust that your supermarket blueberries
labeled as organic are, in fact, organic. Their route from farm to
shipper to market is documented and traced.
Schafer says that while mineral bag-and-tag is not a perfect
system, he calls it “an important first step in diligence and
transparency.”
“We keep the tags locked up. And there are two locks and two
keys,” Lionel Sematuro explains to Schafer and Mitchell at a mine
run by Piran Rwanda Ltd.
They’re standing inside an old rust-red shipping container that
serves as a depot and safe box for 220-pound plastic bags filled
with Piran’s tin ore. To ensure traceability — that mineral ore has
been dug legally by legit workers on the company payroll, not by
unknown freelancers — each heavy bag is tagged then kept under lock
and key in that shipping container.
A carefully kept logbook, filled out by hand and also locked in
that same shipping container, documents all mineral movements.
Traceability “helps ensure investors that they’re not investing
in unsafe or unfair practices, that they’re investing in
responsibly sourced minerals, that we’re doing things correctly and
by the book,” explains Ashley Dace, with Piran Rwanda Ltd.
The importance of mineral traceability extends beyond the mining
process to refining and smelting, and ultimately the
ready-to-market minerals that Intel and other tech firms worldwide
need to buy.
Ensuring all minerals entering the supply chain can be traced to
responsible sources is a major element of Intel’s responsible
sourcing strategy — and is shared across the tech industry.
Intel joins Apple, Facebook, Google, others
In Rwanda, the Intel team talked not just with mine operators,
refiners and local government leaders, but also with fellow
corporate responsibility representatives in the technology
industry. Accompanying the Intel team on several of the mine and
government visits were reps from Apple, Facebook, Google, Nokia and
other companies with whom Intel has been partnering on conflict
minerals and responsible sourcing issues for nearly a decade.
Says Schafer: “It’s important that we continue to work with our
peers and customers to help make our industry even better.”
For the past six years, of the more than 200 companies whose
mineral sourcing programs are analyzed by the Responsible Sourcing
Network, Intel has ranked No. 1.
Why does this matter? Increasingly, as Intel Corporate
Responsibility director Suzanne Fallender points out, investors
want to know that firms in which they stake a claim are behaving as
responsible corporate citizens. Fallender told Greenbiz that
investors “demand more accountability than ever, and companies have
an obligation to be transparent with them.”
Schafer and Mitchell say their Rwandan mine inspection made
clear the importance of continued mineral ore tracing. The visit —
the first of its kind by Intel in seven years — signaled to local
players the importance of responsible sourcing to Intel and other
firms.
They also say they now recognize the industry needs a better way
to account for so-called “artisanal miners” to legitimately join in
the mining process. These are local citizens whose livelihood may
depend on digging for minerals to sell on the open market. The
challenge, says Mitchell, is “how to reduce the risk” that
unfettered artisanal mining could open the door to human rights
abuses – while still helping local residents to support themselves
and their families.
‘Entire periodic table’
What next? Intel is not planning to quit at the 3TG minerals.
Each of these minerals occupies one of those 118 little squares on
the periodic table of elements that many of us remember from high
school chemistry classrooms.
Standing on that jungled mountainside in Rwanda, Schafer
explains that Intel’s ambitions are much greater — they are set out
in the company’s 2020 Corporate Responsibility Report and its 2030
Corporate Strategy and Goals.
“As we expand from conflict minerals to responsible sourcing, we
and the industry are responsible for the entire periodic table,” he
says. “Our goal is to respect all aspects of human rights,
environmental impact and the people in the communities who are
sourcing the materials that are critical to our industry.”
About Intel
Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) is an industry leader, creating
world-changing technology that enables global progress and enriches
lives. Inspired by Moore’s Law, we continuously work to advance the
design and manufacturing of semiconductors to help address our
customers’ greatest challenges. By embedding intelligence in the
cloud, network, edge and every kind of computing device, we unleash
the potential of data to transform business and society for the
better. To learn more about Intel’s innovations, go to
newsroom.intel.com and intel.com.
© Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo and other Intel marks
are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries. Other
names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
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Patricia Oliverio-Lauderdale 408-653-5478
patricia.oliverio-lauderdale@intel.com
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