How Lasers Could Help Fingerprint Conflict Minerals 31
New submitter carmendrahl writes "Diamonds might get most of the media's attention, but they're not the only minerals being sold to underwrite militias. Two chemistry teams are developing portable instruments that can detect an elemental fingerprint in mineral ores, to verify that the samples don't come from militia-controlled mines. One technique uses laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (PDF), which vaporizes a small amount of an ore sample with a high-energy laser pulse, and detects elements in the sample by their characteristic light emission. The other technique couples the laser ablation to a mass measurement and a scanning electron microscope."
Probably won't help much in electronics... (Score:5, Informative)
The targetted mineral in this analysis seem to be coltan (which is refined into tantalum for capacitors) used in the electronics assembly business. Unfortunatly, the electronics supply chain is so obtuse and full of counterfeits as lots of jelly bean components (commodity components like capacitors and resistors) are purchased on the spot-market by board assembly houses, and nobody seemed to care where the stuff comes from as long as the assembly house got a deal.
As an example of how messed up it can be, back in 1998, there was a terrible spike in bad electrolytic capacitors read the wiki about this [wikipedia.org]. Nobody is sure where this stuff came from (although many suspect rogue suppliers that did industrial espionage). Tantalum capacitors tend to be physically smaller parts with even less labeling and counterfeits tend to be "mixed" in with real parts (or maybe the real parts are "cut" with counterfeits), so even lot identification is hard to do.
If people are serious about conflict materials like Coltan in the Congo, the real thing to do is to lower the demand for new electronic assemblies (just like people say reducing the new diamond demand is the only way to do anything about conflict diamonds). These are really just fungable commodities. If you don't buy the conflict version, someone will. As an example, I don't see people using laser spectroscopy on their gasoline to see if their crude oil was refined in Iraq, it's because it doesn't help.
Although folks may talk about labelling (e.g., like "free-trade-coffee" or "shade-grown") to inform consumers, people are just talking about the "beans" and rarely ask about the origin of the cloth "sack" holding the "beans". In a device like a iPhone the A5-chip and maybe the memory chips are the "beans" and the capacitor is sort of like the "sack". It holds the beans, but nobody thinks about it that much. Labelling doesn't get very far when you think of it like that.
I see all sorts of folks talking about reducing their footprint of other things (carbon, water, oil, etc), but I rarely see anyone saying that we shouldn't be buying the latest and greatest electronic do-hickys (kBlah8 just came out, I'm gonna to toss my kBlah7 and buy the new one). Maybe we should all be using our electronic whiz-bangs a bit longer to reduce the demand for these conflict minerals (and all the other environmental damage assembling new and disposing of old electronic do-hickys cause).