Coltan, Tungsten, & Tin

Coltan, Tungsten, & Tin

Commodity Atlas Coltan, Tungsten, & Tin Countries Where Coltan, Tungsten, & Tin are Reportedly Produced with Forced Labor and/or Child Labor Coltan, tungsten and tin are reportedly produced with forced labor (FL) and/or child labor (CL) in the following...
Bloomberg Businessweek

Bloomberg Businessweek

As the minutes ticked by on the afternoon of April 28, 2015, Harold Vilches watched stoically while customs officers at Santiago’s international airport scrutinized his carry-on. Inside the roller bag was 44 pounds of solid gold, worth almost $800,000, and all the baby-faced, 21-year-old college student wanted was clearance to get on a red-eye to Miami. Vilches had arrived at the airport six hours early because he thought there might be some trouble—he’d heard that customs had recently seized shipments from competing smugglers. But Vilches had done this run, or sent people to do it, more than a dozen times, and he’d prepared his falsified export paperwork with extra care. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t have any trouble. While he waited, he texted his contacts in Florida, telling them he’d already cleared customs. The plan was to hand off the gold at the Miami airport to a pair of guards, who would load it into an armored truck for the short trip to NTR Metals Miami LLC, a company that buys gold in quantities large and small and sells it into the global supply chain.

The Guardian

The Guardian

About one-fifth of the gold exported from Peru is illegally mined, with forced labor extracting much of the precious metal that ends up in cellphones, computers and jewelry, according to US non-profit Verité. Peru’s Andean mineral wealth has made it the world’s sixth-largest gold producer and boosted it into the ranks of middle-income countries, but some miners have paid for the boom with their freedom – or their lives.