ECO/GADGET SPECIAL...Your Smartphone AND Tablet Could Be Costing a Life

Your Smartphone AND Tablet Could Be Costing a Life

THE KILLER FIELDS 

Soaring demand for smartphones and other electronic devices is devastating the tin-producing Indonesian islands of Bangka and Belitung, where an average of one person died in accidents every week last year

In May 29, in the bottom of a tin-mining pit on Bangka Island in Indonesia, a wall about 16 feet high collapsed, killing a 40-year-old father of two. His name was Rosnan. Someone stuck a withered sapling into the soft bottom of the pit near the spot where Rosnan fell—a far too frequent sight in the mines of Bangka Island, where Rosnan was the first of six to die on the job during a single week this spring. Rosnan worked among thousands of Indonesians who wield pickaxes and buckets each day on Bangka, extracting the tin that becomes the solder, which binds components in the world’s tablet computers, smartphones, and other electronics. In recent years, about one-third of all the tin mined in the world has come from Bangka, its sister island Belitung to the east, and the seabeds off the islands’ shores. Since almost half of all tin is turned into solder for the electronics industry, a dominant force in the global tin market today is tablets and smartphones bought by consumers in the US and elsewhere. The trail from the dangerous mines to the leading names in electronics, including Foxconn Technology Group, the biggest manufacturer for Apple and others, is clear. Shenmao Technology and Chernan Metal Industrial — two of the top solder makers in Asia, both suppliers to Foxconn — say they buy 100% of their tin from Indonesia. Shenmao estimates it’s the dominant supplier of solder to China, the cradle of electronics manufacturing, and accounts for 16% of the global market. Chernan says other clients have included Sony, Panasonic, Samsung and LG. Several other solder makers declined to discuss their tin sourcing. But their product is so crucial to electronics that tin is the most common metal used by Apple suppliers, according to data Apple made public earlier this year; 179 suppliers for the company, maker of the iPad and iPhone, which are assembled by Foxconn, use tin in components for Apple. While estimates from tin industry officials are wide-ranging, there may be anywhere from 15,000 to 50,000 miners on permitted and unpermitted sites, scrounging in the pits of Bangka and Belitung. Though ubiquitous, the smallscale mines floating along the shore, and many on the island, are technically illegal. This does not seem to matter. Mined legally or illegally, from land or sea, tin ore from Bangka and its neighbouring island flows each day into the global supply chain.
Soldering On
Tin’s real use is for solder. Electronics makers use solder, which today typically contains more than 95% tin, to attach and connect components. The solder points are tiny but omnipresent, numbering about 7,000 in just two of the components in an iPad, according to research company IHS’s iSuppli. A large flat-screen TV can contain as much as 4.8 gm of solder, according to German solder maker Henkel. London-based solder maker Cookson Group told investors in a February 27 presentation that growth for its solder was “still underpinned” by “buoyant” sales of three things: smartphones, tablets, and Internet data servers. Foxconn confirmed it uses solder made of Indonesian tin from, at a minimum, Shenmao and Chernan. But the company declined to say what share of its total might come from other solder makers who buy tin elsewhere. Indonesian tin is becoming more desirable for companies hoping to avoid controversy over sourcing materials in Africa. As US-listed companies need to disclose whether any “conflict minerals” from Africa’s war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo are in the supply chains for their products, buying Indonesian tin is the expedient route to a “conflict-free” guarantee, solder makers say. Prompted by concerns about Africa, Apple said in a report this year that it had traced solder used by its component makers to 58 of the world’s tin refiners, but it did not publicly identify them. Contacted for this story and told of some of the conditions on Bangka Island, Apple spokesman Steve Dowling declined to comment on the identities of any of the tin refiners in Apple’s supply chain or their locations. He did say Apple provides funding for education programmes in Indonesia, but this is intended for locals who may be lured into coercive labour at Asian electronics plants.
ITRI says about 70% of all tin in the past decade has come, roughly equally, from two countries: Indonesia and China. About 12% of China’s production comes from small-scale mining pits, too, according to ITRI data. As with many commodities, China does not often export tin, holding on to it for domestic manufacturers. Indonesia, by contrast, exports virtually all of its tin, and more than 90% of it comes from the Bangka-Belitung province, according to the government. This means the bulk of worldwide tin exports originates in and around Bangka, and that most phones for sale in the US almost certainly have a little piece of the troubled island inside. As mining continues, it becomes more dangerous. The world’s biggest exporter of refined tin, Timah, a publicly traded company based on Bangka, says ore concentrations have plummeted 63% on the island in just the past two decades. Scarcity creates the need for deeper mines, which are more likely to cave in. “I don’t know about the deposits in the land,” says Johan Murod, a portly businessman who owns three tin smelting plants and a dredge. “But if the price is high, we can just dig deeper.” Until late last year, Murod was the secretary of an association representing independent refiners on the island, who supply almost half of Bangka’s exports. The rest enters the world market through two related mining firms: Timah, which is 65% owned by the Indonesian government, and a smaller company, Koba, which is a 25:75 partnership between Timah and Malaysia Smelting. Timah says it has almost 4,000 fulltime employees and produced 11% of the global tin supply last year, making it the world’s largest integrated tin miner. But the people not reflected in those numbers are probably more vital to tin production. In 2010, the company said 98% of its onshore production came from independent, small-scale miners. Timah has increased the number of small-scale sites in operation from 2009 to 2010 by close to 100%; reaching almost 4,000. Subcontractors run the pits, each with four or five miners, as per Timah’s 2010 annual report. The company says all of its subcontractors receive safety training and are required to cut pits with shallow terraces, in order to avoid collapses.
Safety at Bay
Yet tin ore flows to Timah from communities and pits where miners were killed, where safety was ignored, and from obviously illegal operations, via tin buyers who work as the company’s subcontractors in villages across the island. This does not surprise Murod. When questions are raised about environmental damage, or after a miner is killed, he says, Timah and the independent refiners blame each other, or simply claim that the miners involved were rogues. Agung Nugroho, a spokesman for Timah, declined to comment on specific cases, but says the company will start instructing its smallscale mine operators to halt any tin buying from illegal and dangerous pits. A clear prohibition will be added to all future contracts, he says, adding that illegal mining on the island damages the company’s own operations. Murod says change is overdue. Smelters and mining firms should be forced to pay a share of their revenues into a fund that would be administered by an independent group to improve safety, provide insurance for miners who are killed or injured, and to remediate environmental damage, he says.
Turning a Blind Eye
The companies that dominate the world solder market — Cookson, Henkel, Metallic Resources, and Indium — are not completely in the dark. Five years ago, they expressed alarm about illegal mining, but were concerned that a crackdown by Indonesian authorities was driving tin prices up. On March 12, 2007, following one of the first big price spikes for tin in the last decade, a group called the Solder Products Value Council issued a public statement. It complained that tightened Indonesian export norms and the crackdown on “illegal mining operations mostly in the Bangka-Belitung province” were behind the spike. It is not the first time tin buyers on the island have been indifferent to the local costs of global demand. Bangka has only one building dedicated to preserving history, the Indonesia Tin Museum. The museum’s dominant feature is a mural that shows more than 70 islanders scattered across a vast pit, most hunched over rakes, or stooped under the weight of ore suspended from the tips of shoulder poles. Standing front and just off-centre is the Dutch colonial mining boss. Shaded under a parasol held high by an islander, the boss’s back is turned to three miners, who are only a few feet from him. Two of the men are acting as human crutches, assisting a comrade unable to stand on his own. Shoulder poles are a rare sight at Bangka’s tin pits these days, and there are no Dutch masters. Other-wise, not much has changed; if anything, the terracing shown in the 19th century pit is an improvement.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek  IN ET120908