CNN reports that advocacy group the Enough Project, a group focused on abolishing genocide and crimes against humanity, released a report on Thursday covering a survey and ranking of companies regarding their attiude toward the use of “conflict minerals,” mainly coming from Democratic Republic of the Congo.
These minerals are often used to make smartphones (otherwise referred to as “blood phones”) and other electronic devices and are derived from war-torn areas of the region. Experts monitoring the issue say that the trade and use of these minerals help to perpetuate one of the world’s deadliest conflicts, which has left an estimated 5.4 million people dead from a range of war-related causes, including disease and malnutrition since 1998.
However, the Enough Project reports that for the most part, the bloodiness of these minerals is on the decline. Namely, companies like Dell, Intel, HP, Microsoft and Apple have put more effort into tracking the origins of the metals used in their devices, and an auditing system for smelters of the product has been implemented. An accompanying certification system is currently in development as well which would allow companies to certify some Congo-derived metals as “conflict free.”
But not every company has such a stellar report card. Some, like, Canon, Nikon, Sharp and HTC received relatively low rankings.
Nintendo, unfortunately, ranked at the bottom of the 24 companies with a score of zero.
"Nintendo is, I believe, the only company that has basically refused to acknowledge the issue or demonstrate they are making any sort of effort on it," said Enough Project senior policy analyst Sasha Lezhnev. "And this is despite a good two years of trying to get in contact with them."
Nintendo, however, issued a statement to CNN which said that the company “outsources the manufacture and assembly of all Nintendo products to our production partners and therefore is not directly involved in the sourcing of raw materials that are ultimately used in our products."
"We nonetheless take our social responsibilities as a global company very seriously and expect our production partners to do the same."
According to CNN, a Nintendo spokeswoman declined to speak about the conflict minerals specifically.
This is questionable in its own right, but to put things in perspective, the highest ranked company was Intel with a 60—which means that it has taken 60 per cent of the steps suggested by the Enough Project to establish responsible tracking of minerals (but that’s up from a score of 24 in 2010).
