“Mining in the United States alone is the number one most toxic polluter in the country based on its own reporting of emissions under the toxic releases inventory,” said Sampat. “Metals mining in the U.S. is the leading contributor of toxic emissions by air, water, and land.”

Global gold mining operations also have a history of funding armed conflict. As recently as 2015, more than half of Congolese gold mines were policed by armed combatants. Roughly 80% of artisanal miners in the Congo work in gold sites, which exhibit significantly more armed presence than any other type of mining in the region. At these sites, criminal activity such as illegal taxation has free reign. Experts believe such mining operations financed wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1996 and 2003, leading to the deaths of more than 5 million people. In response to the conflict, the U.S., EU, and China created international trade regulations to prevent businesses from sourcing minerals from the DRC.

Sections of the U.S.’s Dodd-Frank Act added during the Obama administration required American publicly traded companies to disclose their sourcing of minerals to ensure those sources weren’t from the DRC. While this transparency was a step in the right direction in the eyes of humanitarian groups, Dodd-Frank didn’t address the trade of conflict minerals from all regions. Many companies have largely ignored — and inadvertently continued to fund — conflict in other regions like Colombia, where illegal gold mining has surpassed cocaine production as the primary funding source for organized crime and guerilla groups.

Then, in 2017, seven years after the conflict minerals rule became part of the Dodd-Frank Act, the Trump administration threatened to repeal it. Such a repeal never happened, but the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) decided to stop enforcing the law anyway, saying that compelling companies to release such information was potentially unconstitutional. Although Apple has compiled some of the industry’s most thorough conflict minerals reports, few companies reached complete compliance while the rule was in effect.

Is there conflict gold in my iPhone?

For consumers, it’s difficult, maybe impossible, to find a definitive answer to this seemingly simple question. Apple doesn’t publish a complete guide to its supply chain. Even the information the company gives in its conflict minerals reports obfuscate their gold’s true sources. This lack of transparency leaves nonprofits and researchers shouldering the burden of investigating mines. In 2015, the Responsible Sourcing Network ranked a sample of 51 companies based on their first conflict minerals reports. Even the top three companies in terms of best practices and due diligence — Intel, Qualcomm, and Apple — declared their products as “DRC conflict undeterminable.”

In 2016, researchers Yong H. Kim and Gerald F. Davis took this investigation one step further. Their study analyzed over 1,300 conflict minerals reports submitted to the SEC and found only 1%, or 13 companies, could certify themselves as conflict-free with certainty beyond reasonable doubt. (Here, “conflict-free” means not containing minerals sourced from the DRC, not free of conflict minerals in general.) Almost 80% of the corporations in the study admitted they could not determine the country of origin of their materials.

“To do a thorough investigation, in theory, a company needs to have complete visibility and traceability with respect to its supply chains, from the customer-facing focal firm to its actual mining sites,” Kim, one of the study’s authors and an assistant professor of management at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, told OneZero. “To map its entire supply chain, a focal company has to rely on cooperation from its first-tier suppliers, who then survey the focal company’s second-tier suppliers, and so on.”

Transparency fades more and more the further down the supply chain rabbit hole you go. Past second-tier suppliers, “things get exponentially difficult,” said Kim. In the tech industry, the public company is often seven or more degrees of separation from the mining site, and multiple barriers to transparency can arise over the thousands of miles of that supply chain, making gold source investigation impossible for the average person without due diligence from the company.

“You can imagine several scenarios: the identity of suppliers is often considered proprietary information, so many firms resist to disclosing it; the sub-tier suppliers may not have any legal obligation to cooperate in the investigation; some of the sub-tier suppliers are just mom-and-pop shops that do not have the capacity to record where they are getting materials,” Kim explained.

In the process of his research, Kim has come to understand companies might find it easier to prevent conflict minerals from entering their supply chains if they focus on smelters and refiners rather than the mines themselves. “There are thousands of miners, some [without] an official website, but only a few hundred smelters and refiners in the world,” Kim said. After smelting and refining, it’s impossible to identify the origin of individual ores. “If all smelters and refiners are audited to ensure they are not accepting conflict-affected materials, then we can greatly reduce conflict minerals from any company’s production process.”

Apple continues to audit its supply chains, and in 2019, the company removed 18 smelters and refiners for failing to meet its conflict minerals standards. However, because of the opacity of gold’s supply chain, it’s still possible that conflict gold has been making it into our phones. So Apple is trying to circumvent the issue entirely. Rather than continuing to focus its energy on the losing battle of supply chain transparency, the company is trying to tackle its gold consumption problem through recycling.

At a warehouse in Austin, Texas, Apple’s Daisy robot disassembles about 200 used iPhones per hour. First, Daisy removes the phone batteries with a frigid minus-112-degree blast of air. After detaching the screws and the haptics that make the phone vibrate, the parts move on to recyclers for mineral extraction and refinement. Daisy is a nice step, but there are limitations: Apple ships hundreds of millions of iPhones every year, and each robot can disassemble 1.2 million per year. That also requires Apple to recover these iPhones itself through its own trade-in programs or partner retailers like Best Buy.

The company touts its use of 100% recycled tin, and they’re making strides in recovering cobalt, another conflict mineral, from batteries. Their press releases brag about how they engineered an alloy made from 100% recycled aluminum, but they make no mention of exactly how much gold their recycling program recovers.

“Gold is already recovered at high rates due to its value,” Apple said in its 2019 Environmental Responsibility Report. “We’re continuing to identify ways to reduce the amount of gold we use in the plating of components like our printed circuit boards. … We’re working within the complex gold supply chain in order to increase the use of certified recycled gold.” Apple declined requests for comment.

While the company claims its ultimate goal is to create a circular supply chain, with Apple products eventually being made only with materials recycled from Apple products, it continues to rely on mined gold as the primary source for its products.

Along streams and rivers in Alaska and the Yukon, placer mining sites have sat vacant since the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s. Placer mining relies on open-pit excavation that releases sediment, disrupting the natural flow of streams and destroying aquatic habitats. Apple has partnered with the mining company Resolve to re-mine these dormant sites while restoring salmon habitats. But by the end of 2019, Resolve had extracted little more than 1,000 grams of gold.

Despite recycling efforts, Apple continues to source the majority of its gold from countries around the world, including Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, and Brazil, where gold mining poisons land, fuels corruption, violates the sovereignty of indigenous peoples, and funds militant groups. Apple leads the way in due diligence of its gold sourcing, but being the best in an industry that continues such destructive practices will never be good enough.

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