Under the Securities and Exchange Commission’s conflict minerals rule, public companies are required to track the source of tantalum, tin, gold, and tungsten in their supply chains, an effort to strike against mining operations that finance violent militia groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A push is on to require similar measures for cobalt.
The call for additional supply chain due diligence is made in a new report by Amnesty International that cites a prevalence of child labor in cobalt mining.
