By Kay MacDuffee

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COUNTRY ROADS – July 26/09

Just received an email message with a quotation from Leonardo De Vinci. He writes, “I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.” De Vinci lived in the last half of the 15^th century.

The maxim is timeless – as relevant today as it was five hundred years ago. In last week’s column I referenced the connection between recycling old cell phones and the demise of the mountain gorilla. However, knowing about recycling cell phones, or recycling anything for that matter, is pointless unless and until we act on it. Anything from waste reduction, global warming and climate change, to being an agent for peace are only high sounding phrases until we get serious and get at it.

But back to cell phones. Columbite-tantalum, shortened to Coltan, is a metallic ore that is mined in several countries, among them The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It is mined by hand by groups of men and children digging basins in streams by scraping off the surface mud and sloshing the water around the crater. This causes the Coltan ore to settle to the bottom where it is retrieved by the miners. A team can ‘mine’ one kilo of Coltan per day.

The Coltan mining area also contains the Kahuzi Beiga National Park, home of the mountain gorilla, whose population has been cut nearly in half from 258 to 130. As the ground is cleared for mining, the food available for the gorillas is reduced, and the poverty caused by the displacement of the local populations by the miners has meant that gorillas are being killed for their meat which is sold as ‘bush meat’ to the miners. The U.N. Environment Program reports that the number of eastern lowland gorillas in DRC national parks has declined by 90 percent over the past five years.

It’s estimated that 30 percent of schoolchildren in north eastern Congo have left school to dig for Coltan. Mining Coltan is not fun. Miners make a pittance. Armed bandits steal them blind. Fraud is rife and there is danger of landslides and collapsing mines. But even a few dollars a day is tempting in a poor country with an economy in shambles.

The demand for Tantalum continues to grow which in turn fuels an increase in mining. Trading companies sell to processing companies, who sell to capacitor manufacturers whose buyers are those high-tech companies like Ericsson, Intel and Nokia.

When we as global consumers continue to demand the newest cell phone and the latest computer, these companies will continue to pay top dollar for tantalum capacitors, and their suppliers will continue to take tantalum from wherever it is available. We cannot ignore the links between the cell phones and computers we use and discard every day and the devastation taking place now in the Congo.

And that is why the Toronto Zoo is begging us to recycle our old cell phones. Green TEA Caledon can help. They have set up depots for collecting them. If you didn’t see the list in last week’s column simply drop them at any branch of the Caledon Library and Green TEA will collect them and send them to a reverse logistics company.

Now we know . . . so we can act – purposefully and compassionately.

It’s a grim lesson in how everything on the planet is connected. And what we do to this web, of course, we do to ourselves.

Special Thanks to Kay MacDuffee and her/my Friend …

Posted by John Malloy on Jul 29 2009. Filed under International. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry