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Out of Africa: the blood tantalum in your mobile phone

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Lovelee
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« on: May 10, 2009, 05:47:44 pm »

Tantalum is a rare metal with unique properties. Chief among these is that with a melting point of 2996 degrees Celsius it's a superlative thermal conductor.

Almost two-thirds of the world's tantalum production ends up in high quality capacitors that are used in devices such as mobile phones and other electronic gadgets.

Only trace quantities are used in each device with a typical Nokia mobile phone, for instance, containing about 40 milligrams of the stuff. But being the golden age of gadgetry, tantalum should be in high demand.

And as the mining company supplying more than 50 per cent of the world's tantalum demand, Australia's Talison Minerals should have been reaping the rewards of its market domination.

Talison - which operates tantalum mines at Wodgina in the Pilbara and Greenbushes, three hours' drive south-east of Perth - has instead spent the past three years scaling down its operations.

That process culminated last December in the mothballing of the second and largest of its mines at Wodgina - a decision that brought a halt to all of its tantalum mining and most of its processing.

With spot prices for tantalum today in the doldrums, high extraction and compliance costs and an unfavourable exchange rate, the company says it's no longer viable to mine the ore in Australia.

As a result, what was a multi-million dollar export market has all but dried up.

Peter Robinson, a veteran mining executive who has been Talison's chief executive since 2006, says it's not just the fault of the prevailing economic climate.

The roots of Talison's problems lie in a conflict that is being fought out 10,000 kilometres away on the other side of the Indian Ocean.

Blood tantalum

For much of the past decade, cheap supplies of tantalum derived from mines under the control of various rebel groups based in the north-eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have flowed into a long and complex supply chain.

Among those groups profiting from this trade are Hutu militia associated with the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

"There doesn't seem to be any shortage of material coming from that area," Robinson says. "People are making money wherever they can."

In central Africa, tantalum is extracted from an ore called coltan, short for columbite-tantalite.

Coltan is found in alluvial deposits or mined in primitive open-cut pits by workers - some of whom are children, enslaved or indentured - using the most basic of tools.

In the same way that the Taliban uses opium to fund its war in Afghanistan, or rebel groups in Colombia thrive off the proceeds of cocaine sales, the civil war in Congo is bankrolled by the sale of illegally mined "conflict resources" such as tantalum.

The International Rescue Committee refugee action group says the conflict has resulted in the death of over 5.4 million Congolese over the past decade.

"The economic dimension of the conflict has always been an important dimension but originally when some of these armed groups were created they weren't necessarily there to exploit the minerals," says Carina Tertsakian, a team leader with Global Witness, a London-based NGO that investigates natural resource exploitation.

"But as they managed to take over territory and found that these territories were very rich in minerals they then took advantage of that - a kind of opportunistic behaviour."

The problem now, she says, is that, having realised that there's money to be made, they've become more difficult to dislodge.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/home/technology/blood-tantalum-in-your-mobile/2009/05/08/1241289162634.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2

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