A few days ago some friends of ours who are plugged into the animal rights community mentioned that we shouldn’t buy cell phones – the tantalum used in most of them comes from the Congo, and tantalum miners are killing wildlife (including gorillas) for meat.
Of course, my wife and I have been considering getting a cell phone.
My questions:
How guilty should I feel if we do get a cell phone? Do I have gorilla blood on my conscience? (Never mind my other needless animal death karma issues for now – I eat meat, I wear leather, I swat flies.)
Have any cell phone companies declared themselves gorilla-friendly?
Is there any real reason I should feel worse about the gorillas in the Congo than, say, the conditions of the local human population? For some reason, the fate of the gorillas seems to be the hot button wired to this issue, at least when I’ve heard about it.
I don’t intend for this to end up in Great Debates – I just want to know how serious a problem this is, and how easy it is to sidestep at this point.
Do cell phones use tantalum for something specific? If you are talking about tantalum capacitors they are in every electronic gadget and then some. Cell phones are just one more, why single them out?
Do a search on google for “tantalum capacitors” and you’ll find many suppliers. This sounds like one more silly UL to me.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey the top tantalum producers are Australia, Brazil, and Canada. According to Columbium (Niobium) and Tantalum (1999) (PDF file), the U.S. imported 186 metric tons of tantalum ores and concetrates from Congo in 1998 and 81 tons in 1999, compared to 703 tons from Australia in 1998 and 597 tons from Australia and 173 tons from Canada in 1999. I think this probably refers to direct imports; I don’t know what the figures are for Congolese tantalum in in finished electronic goods imported from, say, Japan, but it doesn’t appear that Congo is a leading world producer, and if anything its importance seems to be declining, presumably due to political turmoil there.
That’s a good question, because the more I looked into this story, the more obvious it became that 1) cell phones are by no means the only tantalum-using devices, and 2) that gorillas aren’t the only Congolese victims.
Perhaps cell phone makers use more Congolese tantalum than other electronics manufacturers do?
Regardless, I expect to see an e-mail petition on this issue any day now.
In the several magazines and tech updates I receive from industry sources, there is always a desire to get away from tantalum capacitors anyway as they are more expensive than regular capacitors. As technology in any particular device’s manufacturing increases tantalum will fade out due to better IC manufacturing. I’ll see if I can dig up any sources…
erislover that is misleading, to say the least. You could say the same about any component which costs money and they all do. Tantalum capacitors are a bit more expensive that other electrolytics but they also have their benefits like being smaller and having extremely low leakage currents. These are very important in many applications. When you need a tantalum capacitor, you use one.
More information I’ve discovered while researching my own topic:
An article in Wireless Newsfactor heavily references the NPR report. The author mentions that he might stop using his cell phone “because the murderous mineral might be coating some of the electronic parts inside its guts.”
And the Industry Standard did an article, as well, which says that “tantalum suppliers can offer little assurance to capacitor manufacturers that their product doesn’t come courtesy of the Congo rebels.”
That makes it clear as mud. I should’ve called this thread, “Is there gorilla blood in my cell phone?” Of course, the answer would be a metaphorical “probably.”
I read those articles and they are somewhat misleading. As I said, electronics is electronics and they offer no proof that cell phones use any more tantalum than any other electronics. Secondly not all or most tantalum comes from Africa. So, the whole thing is a way of making sensationalist news. If you are going to get upset about products which may have something questionable in their manufacture, then you would have difficulty finding anything acceptable. I have not seen anything that would single out cell phones.
That’s actually my overall impression. I suspect that the cell phone angle plays well in the media, but it’s not like it’s simple to calculate how many gorillas (and elephants, and okapi, and Congolese miners) died for your particular phone, or chip, or other gadget.
If/when we get a cell phone, we’ll just be sure not to show it off to our animal-loving friends.
It sounds like a Luddite backlash against something that has become more prevalent than ever: more people that ever (in the US) have cell phones now, particularly younger people and especially since the advent of prepaid phones (where you pay up front for the handset and have to pay in advance for minutes). With this arrangement, idiots can’t get behind by charging up huge bills because the phone just shuts off when they use up their prepaid minutes.
Where I am you see a lot of people who obviously don’t have a lot of money carrying cell phones, although I have also been told that this is the only option left for aforementioned idiots who have left the regular phone company with huge unpaid bills. Also they do-
“OOOOK! OOOOK! OOOOK! OOOOK!”
-hold on a sec, I got a call… - MC
In addition to capacitors, tantalum is also used in SAW filters, which might be a reason that cell phones are particularly being singled out as a consumer device using these components. Presumably, this objection might apply to any piezoelectric crystal applications.
So… if we refuse Congo tantalum (“Excuse me Radio Shack part-timer is that capacitor content Congo cruelty free?”) and tantalum exports decrease and mining and processing jobs are lost, this will reduce pressure to kill Gorillas to make an extra buck by the unemployed how exactly?
Having spent several years living and traveling all over the DR Congo, I don’t see how the threat to gorillas is made any worse by the exploitation of tantalum deposits. The local people with the wherewhithal to hunt (i.e. gun owners) tend to hunt and eat anything they can, including great apes. And the growing population needs more and more gorilla-free farmland to feed itself.
Here are some hypothetical effects of increased exploitation of tantalum reserves on gorillas.
If the people are out digging up tantalum, they aren’t hunting.
Tantalum miners will use their money to buy rifles with which to hunt gorillas.
Tantalum miners will use their money to buy local chicken, local beef, imported sardines (or whatever) reducing the demand for bush meat such as gorilla.
The only thing that will save the wild gorillas in Rwanda/Easter Congo is something that makes the gorillas more valuable to the people alive than dead. I don’t see how Americans eschewing cell phones will to that.
Personally, I agree that the rest of you should give up your cell phones.
These stories are aimed at people who buy everything they need from stores. These people don’t realize that there are people who don’t have that option. People do live off of wild animals. Some like those in the US who eat lobster or fish, eat wild animals by choice. Others, like those miners, do it because it’s their normal source of food.
The miners will be eating wild animals whether they are mining tantalum for your cell phones, diamonds for your rings, or gold for your necklaces.
