According to Amnesty International's new report, Apple is the technology company most committed to monitoring the sourcing of raw materials such as cobalt.
The cost of smartphones and other electronic devices that have now taken on a central role in our lives is still very high — more than we tend to think. We ignore, or prefer to ignore, the fact that the raw materials needed to make these devices often come from areas marked by severe political and social instability, and have been extracted exploiting child labour. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, thousands of children are forced to work in terrible conditions in mines to extract cobalt, a rare mineral indispensable for the manufacture of electric batteries. The new report by Amnesty International, Time to Recharge, examines precisely the sustainability and respect for human rights of the giants of the technology and mobility sectors, including Apple, Samsung Electronics, Dell, Microsoft, Bmw, Renault and Tesla.
The report examined 29 companies and assessed their efforts to halt human rights violations present in the cobalt supply chain. The report follows a similar study published in 2016, in the hope of finding improvements. "Nearly two years on, some of the world's richest and most powerful companies are still making excuses for why they have not investigated their supply chains," said Seema Joshi, director of Amnesty International's Business and Human Rights programme. "Even those that have done so are not disclosing the human rights risks and violations they have found. If companies don't know where their cobalt comes from, their customers certainly don't."
The humanitarian organisation assessed the companies against five criteria reflecting international standards, including the obligation to carry out supply chain due diligence and to be transparent about human rights risks. The results were disheartening: none of the 29 companies had taken adequate action to meet the standards.
Despite the collective failing grade, Apple emerged as the company most committed to monitoring the sourcing and processing of the materials needed to manufacture its products. The Cupertino company is indeed the first company to have published the list of its cobalt suppliers, and since 2016 has been pressing the Chinese firm Huayou Cobalt — which handles almost all of the cobalt mined in Congo — to identify and eliminate human rights violations throughout the supply chain.
Besides Apple, some companies such as Dell and Hp have begun investigating their suppliers and have adopted stricter policies to ensure respect for workers; many large companies, however, have shown no progress whatsoever. Among these is Microsoft, which has not made information about its suppliers available to its customers and continues to operate with a lack of transparency.
According to the Amnesty report, electric vehicle manufacturers are even less transparent about their cobalt sourcing. Renault and Daimler failed to meet even the minimum transparency requirements, while among the companies examined Bmw performed best but has yet to publish the names of the companies that smelt and refine the cobalt it sources. "Cobalt is a key component in the development of so-called green technology," said Joshua Rosenzweig, Amnesty International's adviser on Business and Human Rights. "It is more important than ever that the companies producing it behave transparently."