Nintendo Blood Minerals: Company Isn’t Doing Enough

There’s a pretty nasty war going down in the Congo right now, and a lot of the materials found in your favorite gadgets are fueling the ongoing conflict, according to Kotaku. Minerals such as tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold, many of which are contained within the system you use to play Call of Duty, are mined from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In fact, the ensuing battle for these “blood minerals” is often referred to locally as the Playstation War.

In a recent report, companies such as Nintendo, Intel, and Apple have been singled out for not doing enough to ensure these materials aren’t coming from the Congo. The Enough Project, a group which monitors crimes against humanity, has criticized these companies for not taking steps to keep these minerals out of their products.

“Nintendo is, I believe, the only company that has basically refused to acknowledge the issue or demonstrate they are making any sort of effort on it,” The Enough Project’s Sasha Lezhnev explained to CNN. “And this is despite a good two years of trying to get in contact with them.”

In the report, the group claims that Nintendo “failed to make any known effort to trace or audit its supply chain, despite growing public awareness.”

In response to the allegations, Nintendo has fired back against The Enough Project, releasing a statement to CNN. According to the company, it “outsources the manufacture and assembly of all Nintendo products to our production partners and therefore is not directly involved in the sourcing of raw materials that are ultimately used in our products.”

“We nonetheless take our social responsibilities as a global company very seriously and expect our production partners to do the same,” Nintendo added.

Do you think Nintendo should pay closer attention to where they get their materials, or is it up to the the company’s production partners to police themselves?