Okay…now that I’ve heard a lot more about the strife and bloodshed surrounding the mining of minerals like coltan for iPods, cell phones, and such, I am wondering if there is an alternative out there. I’ve got CDs spilling all over my car with music on them and would really rather have an MP3 player of some kind–just not the kind made with “bloody coltan.”
Does such a product exist?
I’ve never heard of coltan, much less any conflict with it’s mining. According to Wikipedia, The Congo produces a little less than 1% of the world’s tantalum, peaking at ~10% in 2000 and 2008. So I think it’s very unlikely you’d get anything from that region. I think the most likely way to find out it’s origin is to contact the manufacturers of such devices and see if they can send you any marketing info about it. Even then, they may not even know if they contract out the work to third party manufacturers who may not be forthcoming with how they do business.
I don’t think you’re doing to find such a device that doesn’t use Coltan. But you might find a manufacturer that doesn’t source their Coltan from the DRC, which only accounts for a tiny fraction of the market, from what I’ve read. What makes you think Apple’s suppliers buy their Coltan from the DRC?
Coltan = Niobium/Tantalum ore, and you unlikely to find any sophisticated modern electronic device that doesn’t use tantalum capacitors.
The stuff seems to be mined primarily in Canada, Australia and Brazil.
Just get a used one.
I thought it was only used to make Terminators.
Supposedly, a great deal of mining of coltan takes place in the DRC. But there is conflicting info, so it’s hard to know for sure.
It’s a fungible commodity. As long as anyone, anywhere, is willing to buy from Congo, the source for yours is irrelevant. If you get it from a non-conflict source, that takes some off the market, making the conflict stuff the stuff that’s available for someone who doesn’t care.
Unless you can get everyone to refuse to buy from there, it makes no difference where yours came from.