Intel Travels to Africa to Closely Track Responsibly Sourced Tech Minerals

Standing beside a rutted red dirt road at about 5,000 feet up in the jungled mountains of northern Rwanda, Intel’s Adam Schafer explains in four words why he and a teammate had traveled from Oregon to this especially remote part of Central Africa.

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A worker inside a tin mine run by the Comikagi cooperative, near Nyamugali, Rwanda. A team from Intel's Responsible Minerals Program, as well as representatives of other tech firms, visited mineral-rich Rwanda in November 2019 as part of an industry effort to ensure a legal and ethical supply chain. Tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold mined in the Central African country are key components of silicon chips that run today's smartphones, laptops, servers and other high-tech gear. (Credit: Walden Kirsch/Intel Corporation)

“We’re here to learn.”

With banana trees swaying behind him, Schafer continues: “Our goal is to protect the people and the planet, both of which help us produce our products. We want to meet the responsible sourcing expectations of our customers, shareholders and employees.”

Schafer is Intel’s director of Supply Chain Sustainability. Late last year, he and Erin Mitchell, manager of Intel’s Responsible Minerals Program, spent a week crisscrossing Rwanda’s mineral-rich mountains — fording creeks in a four-wheel drive, scrambling down narrow mountain trails to mine entrances and asking questions at every turn.

Why Rwanda? The minerals — tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold (known as 3TG) — that lie both deep underground and right on the surface in this part of Africa are essential to the worldwide silicon manufacturing industry.

In chip manufacturing, for example, tantalum is a metal uniquely well-suited as a diffusion barrier on advanced copper interconnects. In the assembly/test process, tin offers a low melting point and is a key component of the solder that attaches silicon chips to their packaging. Gold is corrosion-resistant and an excellent electrical conductor for the tiny pins that connect chips to other components.

On behalf of Intel, Schafer and Mitchell made the trip to fully understand the first part of a complex process. It begins with a chunk of mineral ore in Africa and — after passing through many hands, including miners, refiners, smelters and sellers, scattered across the globe — eventually winds up in chip factories. Ultimately, it turns up in your computer, your tablet, your smartphone, as well as in the millions of servers that run the internet and likely are delivering this story to you.