Sustainable Procurement & CSR News - ICT Industry

The new law obliges French companies to adhere to a vigilance plan to prevent violations of human rights and environmental damage throughout their production chains. Companies can be sanctioned with fines of up to €30 million for not respecting the rules. 

Only about 1% of the companies were able to declare that their products were conflict-free beyond a reasonable doubt. Of the rest, 19% declared that they had no reason to believe their products contained DRC conflict minerals. The remaining 80% admitted that they were unable to determine their raw materials’ country of origin.

Telstra has a unique opportunity to lead the way in stewarding retired electronics, and providing solutions to e-waste.

Disruptive technologies and digital infrastructure have the potential to solve some of the world’s most pressing risks and to transform industries. These include safeguarding the planet's soil and water, and improving inequality and education.
This is the main conclusion of the 2017 Global Opportunity Report, released by DNV GL, Sustainia and the United Nations Global Compact. The report also demonstrates the commitment of the global business community towards taking action on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 agenda.

In this latest twist of the scandal that's been rocking South Korea for weeks, prosecutors are investigating allegations that Samsung might have provided €2.8m euros ($3.1m, £2.5m) to a company co-owned by Ms Choi and her daughter, to bankroll the daughter's equestrian training in Germany.

Chinese telecommunication sector is fully integrated into the global supply chain. Among the multinational companies supplied by Chinese telecoms are Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson, who both produce and sell in the U.S. market. As a result, it is practically impossible to turn away from “Made in China” products. Rather than officially boycott Chinese telecom products or engage in protectionism, the United States could mitigate security threats by adopting an inspection system similar to the United Kingdom’s.

Conditions in the mines are rarely safe, and Amnesty International reports that most miners work without essential protective gear, such as gloves, work clothes, or face masks to protect their skin and lungs from disease. The organization says at least 80 miners died in the DRC between September 2014 and December 2015, and many more become ill from working in the poor conditions.
To make matters worse, many of the miners Amnesty International interviewed were children who said they worked for 12 hours a day to earn a mere dollar or two. UNICEF says that approximately 40,000 children worked in mines in the DRC in 2014, and that the majority of them were mining cobalt.

information and communications technology, or ICT, can potentially save 1.5 GT of CO2e in the year 2030. That’s fully 2.7 times greater than the full carbon emissions of the UK in 2012, and 37% of the EU’s 2012 emissions. Of course, we know that all those server farms and cell towers use a lot of energy themselves, but according to the report, the ICT emissions overhead is only about 5.3%.

The Post traced this cobalt pipeline and, for the first time, showed how cobalt mined in these harsh conditions ends up in popular consumer products. It moves from small-scale Congolese mines to a single Chinese company — Congo DongFang International Mining, part of one of the world’s biggest cobalt producers, Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt — that for years has supplied some of the world’s largest battery makers. They, in turn, have produced the batteries found inside products such as Apple’s iPhones — a finding that calls into question corporate assertions that they are capable of monitoring their supply chains for human rights abuses or child labor.

The Samsung labor scandal has hit Malaysia factory where the workers have to work under poor conditions and paid as little as £268 a month [A$449]. A total of 2,000 workers spend up to 12 hours a day in the plant where Samsung microwaves are manufactured. Is the company cheating factory workers?

Companies say the conflict minerals law has created an expectation both inside their corporate headquarters and among consumers that their products will be “conflict-free.”
They do not want to back away from that now. But they worry their efforts will be undermined without the law to support them.

The Joint Audit Cooperation held its sixth corporate and social responsibility forum bringing together 133 representatives from large ICT companies, i.e. telecom operators and equipment manufacturers, organizations active in Corporate Social Responsibility issues (CSR), academia, auditing companies, International NGOs to further develop sustainable business practices.

A recent study issued by the United Nations University’s Sustainable Cycles programme (UNU) indicates that the amount of e-waste in Asia has risen by 63 percent in the last five years. In China, the generation of e-waste more than doubled between 2010 and 2015, with Hebei, Hunan, Guangdong and Jiangxi Provinces being the most prominent.

The men said they had been deceived about pay, had their passports confiscated and had been told that they must pay large fines if they wanted to return to Nepal before the end of their contract. They also claimed they were forced to work for up to 14 hours on their feet without adequate rest, and with restricted toilet breaks, in an attempt to settle recruitment fees of up to £1,000 – they said they had to pay this money to secure their jobs

Apple, HP, Samsung SDI and Sony have joined an effort known as the Responsible Cobalt Initiative. It is being led by a Chinese business group, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce for Metals, Minerals and Chemicals Importers and Exporters, and supported by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), according to the Chinese group.

Members of the initiative pledged to follow OECD guidelines for mining supply chains, which call for companies to trace how cobalt is being extracted, transported, manufactured and sold. Any abuses would require immediate correction.

Nearly 50,000 workers from some of Vietnam's poorest towns and villages work up to 12 hours a day in the vast Samsung complex built amid farmland with one of Southeast Asia's cheapest labour markets.
And while Samsung insists it will not axe jobs in Vietnam this year because of the scandal, workers in the battery factory within the complex say the company has already started temporary lay-offs.

Urging governments, businesses and civil society leaders to develop new technologies that have a lasting social impact in his message for the Day, the UN chief highlighted that the 17 Sustainable Development Goals specifically call for employing information and communication technology (ICT) to realize the overall vision of a life of dignity for all people. 
“These technologies provide smart solutions to address climate change, hunger, poverty and other global challenges,” the Secretary-General said. “They are key instruments for providing mobile health care and access to education, empowering women, improving efficiencies in industrial and agricultural production, and safeguarding the environment.”

Tracing the origins of the graphite in a phone, for example, requires finding out where the ­phonemaker obtains batteries, where the battery makers acquire the portion of batteries known as anodes, and where the anode producers get their graphite. Moreover, because there are multiple suppliers at each step and various types of graphite, it is difficult to know where any given batch of the mineral ends up.
Several companies declined to disclose the origin of their graphite. For example, Tesla, perhaps the best-known electric-car maker, uses Panasonic batteries. Tesla said those batteries have never included graphite from the Chinese company BTR, but it declined to identify its graphite source.