19-03-2010 BusinessGreen: Congo tracking project aims to end IT industry's use of "blood tin" - Apple, Dell, HP and Sony mentioned

Excerpt from the BusinessGreen website:

A coalition of mining and IT firms, including some of the world's largest producers of tin and a host of household names such as Apple, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Nokia and Sony, have today announced the launch of a major new project designed to stop so-called "conflict minerals" from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) being used to make computer components.

...

Now tin industry trade association ITRI is seeking to tackle the problem with the launch of a pilot scheme designed to track minerals and provide provenance information from individual mine sites in eastern DRC.

The project has secured funding from a wide range of sources, including a levy on the association's smelter members and a coalition of downstream purchasers of the affected minerals, including a host of IT and mobile phone firms.

The project, which follows a due diligence study designed to assess whether such a tracking system is possible, will begin by selecting a number of pilot mine sites in the relevant cassiterite and columbo-tantalite exploitation areas in North and South Kivu.