George Monbiot has a pop at Apple in today's Guardian. It's all about the ethical sourcing of the materials that go into the iPhones, iPads and other iKit. More specifically, the claim is that Apple, or Apple's suppliers, purchase tin from the islands of Bangka and Belitung in Indonesia. Or that they might be and that Apple isn't saying. It's a very strange thing to be complaining about because those two places are almost certainly the most environmentally sound places to be getting your tin from. The why of this depends on a few details about tin mining: something that George and Friends of the Earth (who are running a campaign on this) tend not to really understand. You know, this tricky details stuff?
I should point out here that I'm not entirely unbiased on this matter: I am in the process of trying to set up a project with the largest miner on the islands. Indeed, I received samples from them just this morning. So you could indeed accuse me of bias: even though my project is to clean up some of the pollution, nothing at all to do with the actual mining itself. On the other hand it also means that I know the important parts about the technology and thus why the mining there is indeed ecologically sound.
Here's Monbiot:
Nearly half of global tin supplies are used to make solder for electronics. About 30% of the world's tin comes from Bangka and Belitung islands in Indonesia, where an orgy of unregulated mining is reducing a rich and complex system of rainforests and gardens to a post-holocaust landscape of sand and acid subsoil. Tin dredgers in the coastal waters are also wiping out the coral, the giant clams, the local fisheries, the endangered Napoleon wrasse, the mangrove forests and the beaches used by breeding turtles.
Children are employed in shocking conditions. On average, one miner dies in an accident every week. Clean water is disappearing, malaria is spreading as mosquitoes breed in abandoned workings, and small farmers are being driven from their land. Those paragons of modernity – electronics manufacturers – rely for their supplies on some distinctly old-fashioned practices.
Sounds terrible, doesn't it? And Apple didn't reveal to Monbiot whether any of its tin came from those two islands. What he would like them to be doing is something like Fairphone does:
While I was tearing out my hair over Apple's evasions, Fairphone was launching its first handset at the London Design Festival. This company, formed not just to build a genuine ethical smartphone but also to try to change the way in which supply chains and commercial strategies work, looks like everything that Apple should be but isn't.
Well, actually, no, Fairphone doesn't do what Monbiot wants Apple to do:
We’re in talks with a mine in Rwanda to conflict-free tungsten and are working with a sustainable tin initiative in Banka, Indonesia through our friends at Friends of the Earth.
It's an ambition for some unknown time in the future. And the Friends of the Earth stuff is here and here. And here's what Apple has to say about it all:
Bangka Island, Indonesia, is one of the world’s principal tin-producing regions. Recent concerns about the illegal mining of tin from this region prompted Apple to lead a fact-finding visit to learn more. Using the information we’ve gathered, Apple initiated an EICC working group focused on this issue, and we are helping to fund a new study on mining in the region so we can better understand the situation.
And now to those pesky details.
The mining industry on those two islands is divided into two parts: the legal part and the illegal. As above, I'm trying to work with the legal part and the legal part is also the vast majority of production there. It's the illegal part that is causing most of the problems that are being described: the deaths of miners, the slicing up of the beaches and so on. And Apple (or any other manufacturer) can't exactly insist upon not using the small amount of production that is coming from the illegal miners and smelters. Because, given that it's illegal, it's smuggled out and sold into the supply chain that way. There's no way of checking the smuggled stuff because, erm, it's smuggled, d'ye see? Further, even if you were able to stop the small scale makers of solder that are then used in electronics from buying that smuggled tin ingot it would only then be sold to scrap merchants, where it would be reprocessed with all the other scrap and then be made into solder. You're just not going to be able to stop this process with a few licences and an email campaign.
Beyond that though there is the fact that this area is almost certainly the most environmentally sound place to be getting tin from anyway. Yes, even with the problems that Monbiot and Friends of the Earth mention. Details again matter here.
There's really only one commercially important ore of tin, that's cassiterite, a form of tin oxide. And that cassiterite comes in two forms, in hard rock deposits or in alluvial ones. If I lean a bit when looking out of my office window I can see the hill that contains Europe's largest deposit of tin or cassiterite on the German/ Czech border. It's a whole mountain called Cinovec which has been mined on and off for centuries. And the tin content of the mountain is about 0.1%. Which means that to get it out you've got to dig up the rock (thus the name of "hard rock" mining) and then crush it down into gravel sized pieces. You then "mill" those down into something with the fineness of sand. You need to reach what is called the "liberation point". That is, get the rock ground down into something about the same size as the pieces of cassiterite in it: only then can you start separating the rock from the ore. You can also do this in something called a "stamping mill" which is an older technology but the aim and intention is the same. We need to make a fine sand out of the whole rock before we can extract the tin ore from said rock. As you can imagine this is an energy intensive process.
Plus, you've either got to blow the top off the mountain to get at the ore, or you need to dig girt big tunnels into it to do the same. Another expenditure of time, energy, effort and money.
Once you've done your grinding you can then separate the cassiterite from the rock/sand quite simply. A bit of wet gravity separation usually does it. To get a mental picture of this think of those troughs of water you always see in a gold mine in Westerns. Given the different densities of the cassiterite and the quartz sand running water will separate them. We just do it rather more efficiently than those 19th century gold mines these days.
Then, once you've got your cassiterite separated you send it off to the smelter and get paid. This is Bronze Age technology at heart and it's also the part of the process that no one, Monbiot, FoE or anyone else is complaining about. What they are complaining about is the preparation of the cassiterite. Which is all very strange as the deposits at Bangka are not horribly difficult to process like the above description of hard rock mining. Definitely not, for they are alluvial deposits.
Way back when when sea levels were much lower erosion and the river systems wore down vast mountains that contained tin deposits all over SE Asia. The movement of water in the rivers did that concentration of the cassiterite just as our wet gravity separation plants do these days on the hard rock deposits. Then sea levels rose again and those concentrations of cassiterite are all over the place in Burma, Thailand, Malaysia and, of course, Indonesia. Some are in shallow waters offshore, some are onshore. The point being that all of that hard work to crush the rock, to liberate the cassiterite, to concentrate it, has already been done by purely natural forces. And this is a massive saving of resources. I've seen a cost proposal for tin mining here, where I am, and for some low grade hard rock deposits the crushing, grinding, milling and separation costs €20,000 per tonne of ore produced. Or, a little bit more than the ore is actually worth. All of this has already been done in Bangka and Belitung. All that it's necessary to do now is dig up the sand containing the cassiterite and do that gold mining trick from the Westerns. This is vastly cheaper and, of course, being cheaper means using fewer resources to do something and using fewer resources is the very definition of being environmentally and ecologically sound.
I've actually seen pictures of someone sea bed mining off Bangka on a raft that looks like it's made out of old plastic soda bottles and powered by a two stroke motorbike engine. It's really just a platform with an industrial vacuum cleaner on it. And yes, you can see the cassiterite in the sand it's so well separated already that it looks like a black vein running along the beach or seabed. Suck up the black sand, dump the lighter coloured (and lighter in weight which is how you separate it) sand back on the seabed and you're done.
This is, as I say, using vastly fewer resources than the alternative method of extracting tin, to go hard rock mining. So why on earth are FoE and the likes of Monbiot complaining about it so? This is what we want people to be doing, isn't it? Gaining the resources we want to use at the least expenditure of resources to get them?
Apologies, but I find it very hard understanding environmentalists some times.
