The BBC's flagship Panorama news reporting program has attacked
There's two parts to the BBC's critique:
Panorama also travelled further down Apple's supply chain to the Indonesian island of Bangka.
Apple says it is dedicated to the ethical sourcing of minerals, but the programme found evidence that tin from illegal mines could be entering its supply chain.
It found children digging tin ore out by hand in extremely dangerous conditions - miners can be buried alive when the walls of sand or mud collapse.
That's all absolutely true. The two islands, Bangka and Belitung, are completely plagued with small scale mining operations. And that's simply what happens in very poor places with exceptionally rich ores of any metal. There are children who work in the rubble of the silver mines at Potosi for example. The reason being that conflation of very, very, poor people (we are talking about the World Bank's definition of absolutely poverty here, $1.25 a day, perhaps a little above that. And yes, that is a PPP calculation, meaning that it's that sum, in American dollars, at American prices of today) who will do just about anything to keep body and soul together alongside mineral ores that are so rich that they can be separated out by people with little more than some running water and a shovel.
The illegality here is not, by the way, over the method of mining nor even the employment of children. It's that these miners are mining land that does not belong to them. There is a large state-owned mining operation on the islands, one that at least attempts to use modern mining techniques (ones that are much, much, safer) and a goodly portion of the world's tin comes from those entirely legal operations. It's simply that those ores really are so rich that people can, and do, go and make a living by camping, almost squatting, on the land.
It's difficult to see that this is Apple's fault.
The reason for all of this is the geology of the place. There's two basic ways of getting tin. The ore is cassiterite and this is usually found in volcanic rocks like granite. As lava moves up that volcano sometimes it blows in those eruptions we sometimes see. At other times it will cool while still under the surface. When that happens various of the metals contained can crystalise out (or their ores perhaps) in much richer than normal concentrations in certain parts of that cooling rock. A lot of geology is devoted to understanding which mineral is likely to be at which point.
This gives rise to our two methods of finding tin. The first is to find one of these areas of tin rich granite and then grind it up very small and extract that cassiterite (usually just with running water). This can be called "hard rock" mining. The second is to find an area where erosion has done this for you. Millions of years have ground down those mountains and then the rivers will preferentially separate out the cassiterite for you. This is known as "alluvial" mining. Think of it more like panning for gold in the dirt at the bottom of a stream if you like.
The islands of Banka and Belitung, and the surrounding seabed, have, with varying sea levels over the millennia (perhaps even epochs), been covered with rich seams of such cassiterite eroded out of the mountain ranges to the north. You can at times actually see them as squiggly lines in the sand: a darker line from a few millimetres to a few centimetres wide and potentially running for hundreds of metres.
Essentially, those ancient rivers have done all the hard work of grinding the material down and enriching the ore, all you need to do now is the final separation step before loading it into a smelter to make tin. This is very, very, basic technology (of the sort that the Cornish tin mines were using before 1,000 BC). It's also environmentally sound, despite what is said here:
The programme also showed dredgers raking up the sand and coral from the seabed in Indonesia to get tin, churning the formally pristine ocean and coral reefs into a sea of mud. The coral doesn't grow back, a marine scientist on the show says.
The coral will, eventually, grow back, the question being what is the value of "eventually." But the energy savings of simply being able to suck up that sand and separate it, rather than having to grind down the rock itself, are vast. Which is why such mining techniques, of such rich ore, can compete with well capitalised hard rock miners using modern equipment.
Again, it's difficult to see that this is really Apple's problem to solve.
As Apple themselves say:
Apple says it is a complex situation on Bangka with tens of thousands of miners selling tin through many middle men.
"The simplest course of action would be for Apple to unilaterally refuse any tin from Indonesian mines. That would be easy for us to do and would certainly shield us from criticism.
"But that would also be the lazy and cowardly path, since it would do nothing to improve the situation. We have chosen to stay engaged and attempt to drive changes on the ground."
As Paul Krugman has pointed out when you ban child labour in very poor places it doesn't mean those children all then go to school, or have better lives. They're doing these jobs because it is the best option open to them under the present circumstances. Removing what is their best option leaves them only with worse ones.
We all, obviously, as a matter of morality as much as public policy, would prefer that this was not so. But poor people with a rich ore source simply are going to do these things. And it seems extraordinary to insist that a company many levels further down the chain should be forced to make the lives of those poor people worse. Which is what Apple abandoning the use of Indonesian tin would do.
In the long term the solution for this is for Indonesia to become richer. Then there will be no people poor enough to take such risks for such paltry amounts of money. Someone opening a sweatshop on the islands to make sneakers would be contributing to that noble cause. Complaining about poor people struggling to make a living in the tin industry less so.
