To give you some background, I am a Marketing Executive from a UK based IT re-use, refurbish and remanufacturing company. We are working on a project and brand that will focus on the circular economy and sustainable IT.
Our problem in the creation of this project, and one of the reasons I am reaching out to you, is related to the re-manufacturing of second hand laptops and conflict minerals and how to offset one mineral found mainly in the batteries, Cobalt.
I had hoped that by reaching out to you, and the community, that you may be able to help me in my quest to find a sustainable source of laptop batteries. Of course, I know that Fairphone works with smartphone orientated suppliers but I wondered if you might be able to give some advice or guidance, especially after reading your report on conflict minerals in collaboration with The Dragonfly Initiative?
I am aware that much of the available Cobalt comes from Australia (the other large majority being the DRC, which I wish to avoid) are you able to point me in the direction of an ethical and sustainable supply chain from the Australian source? Has your research taken you in this direction?
Hoping to discuss and has been great following the research.
it is of course always good to see some development in the field of fair and sustainable IT.
Unfortunately at least I can not really answer your questions. You do realize, that this is a user forum, that is in general independent from the company; oftentimes answers by users to Fairphone in this forum are left without an answer.
I guess, as you are a professional, that you already have found those blogposts as well:
and
As these blogposts do not give contact informations, why not try to contact fairphone by e-mail at research@fairphone.com
Here in the forum you might try to contact @anon14889930, her being the one responsible for the blogpost from june 2017 and working on the value chain.
Hope, this helps a little and wishing you success for your project.
Here on the fairphone community forum you can almost only reach the community. For requests to Fairphone please contact them directly via the support pages or by the email @BertG provides above.
Sounds like you do the “conventional conflict free approach”, while Fairphone does it differently: They intentionally source their minerals from conflict areas to work against the problem instead of just avoiding it.
