Edinburgh university breaks new ground by opposing conflict minerals

Edinburgh university is to cut the use of so-called conflict minerals in goods it buys, with a promise to search out alternatives if a product has raw materials directly linked to wars in the developing world.

Under the policy - the first of its kind for a UK higher education institution - Edinburgh will require its suppliers to provide information on where they source metals such as tin, gold and tungsten in their products.

Campaign groups have warned that the minerals, commonly used in computers, smartphones and electronic equipment, are often mined in dangerous conditions by low-paid workers and children, with their production funding armed groups guilty of human rights abuses in countries such as the Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Dave Gorman, the university’s director of social responsibility, said that the policy was intended to draw attention to an underrecognised issue.

One of our main aims is to raise awareness among our staff and students. But over time we also want to think about how our academics can conduct research and shine a light on this issue.

We’ll also be looking at what we can do with regard to our contracts and procurement. These minerals are widespread within things like PCs, laptops, mobile phones and tablet devices, and we’ll be asking our suppliers whether they can give us assurances about where they’re sourcing their materials from, and if not, what they’ll do to ensure that they can.

Gorman added that while raising the profile of conflict minerals was part of the reason behind the policy, it could also have a more tangible effect, pushing manufacturers to address potential abuses in their supply chain.

If you think of the scale of a university, Edinburgh’s annual turnover is around £850m. Our combined total of staff and students is approaching 50,000 people. In that sense we’re a large organisation with the opportunity to make quite a large impact.

As a single buyer, it’s difficult to claim too much. But we’re hopeful that others will take up this issue and there’ll be a growing band of us.

We’re currently the only institution with a policy on conflict minerals, but we’re not the only people who are worried about this issue. We want to work collaboratively with suppliers, and with other universities, and with the Scottish government to ask the right questions, find out where the problems are and make changes where they need to be made.

Campaigners welcomed the university’s stance. Sophia Pickles, from the organisation Global Witness, which focuses on environmental and human rights abuses connected to natural resources, said customer activism could play a large part in improving conditions for communities supplying materials ultimately bound for the electronics industry.

Behavioural change can certainly have a result. Everyone who’s buying these products has a responsibility to ask questions, and once you do that you can start to scrutinise trading norms and supply chains.

Our investigations over a decade have found that natural resources fund some of the most egregious human rights abuses and conflicts in the world. There are armed groups and elements of national armies using these materials to fund their own fighting objectives rather than for the benefit of the people or the development of countries’ infrastructure.

In the mines I’ve visited in eastern Congo you could have people going down shafts that were over 100m deep, often wearing just flip-flops and shorts. Sometimes they might have a hard hat. The mines operate 24 hours a day, and miners often work long shifts with very little to eat.

Pickles added that groups controlling mines included the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), whose leading figures have been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity in the DRC, and Taliban factions extracting semi-precious lapis lazuli in Afghanistan. But she cautioned against a complete withdrawal from affected countries.

People working in these mines face extremely difficult working conditions, but for many people there’s no other option.

The solution isn’t about avoiding countries like the DRC or the Central African Repulic, it’s about making sure that companies have the right checks in place to improve conditions. It’s about making sure they’ve undertaken a process of due dilligence and can spot the red flags that can indicate abuses.

In 2015 the European parliament voted to enforce compulsory monitoring of minerals from conflict zones. The exact terms of the new regulations are still to be decided.