Blood Coltan: The Playstation War

I love the PS2. Even after getting a Wii, I still play the PS2. But lately, I can’t even look at my old Sony stand-by. Why? Because of the blood it may have spilled. Once called Africa’s World War, a demand for a mineral used in making PS2 systems contributed to the conflict, in what is now being called the PlayStation War. No jokes this time, folks. This is where gaming news gets dark.

Recent conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have apparently been fueled by a demand for coltan from the electronics industry. Coltan is a mineral widely used to manufacture tantalum for electronics and components such as small capacitors used in many of the devices we utilize in our everyday lives. For gamers, this includes laptops and video game consoles.

The militia’s vying for control saw this as an opportunity to fund their armies. They would force villagers, including children, to mine coltan and then sell it to various companies, using the money to fund their war mongering.

Most of the details regarding this issue are being reported by Towards Freedom, an activist website that’s more about human rights than putting down the PS2; but the exploitation of the DRC was exposed by a United Nations Panel of Experts investigation back in 2001. Their report can be found here.

David Barouski, a researcher and journalist from Wisconsin who attests to having witnessed the chaos of eastern DRC firsthand, claims that coltan from this conflict can be found in Sony consoles around the world.

“[Statistical] analysis shows it to be nearly inconceivable that Sony made all its Playstations without using Congolese coltan,” Barouski says. “Sony and other companies like it, have the benefit of plausible deniability, because the coltan ore trades hands so many times from when it is mined to when Sony gets a processed product, that a company often has no idea where the original coltan ore came from, and frankly don’t care to know.”

Satoshi Fukuoka, a spokesperson for Sony Japan, says that while Sony still uses tantalum in some of its parts, they are satisfied with responses from suppliers that tantalum they use and have used in the past is not “illegally mined Congo coltan.”

Fukuoka says the PS2, PSP and PS3, “are manufactured mostly from independent parts and components that manufacturers procured externally.” These materials are manufactured from “multiple mines in various countries,” says Fukuoka. “It is therefore hard for us to know what the supply chain mix is. I am happy to state to you that to the best of our knowledge [Sony] is not using the material about which you have expressed concern.”

The extensive details of this tragedy may make your head spin, but do warrant some of your attention. This could be one of the biggest examples of evil-corporations-at-work that has ever been. In the meantime, I’m packing my PS2 away for a while.