Quantifying the role of the electronics industry in managing conflict minerals using printers

The electronics manufacturing industry has been experiencing a fast-changing landscape with recent legislations targeting the supply chains for the 3TG minerals: tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold mined from the Democratic Republic of Congo. These minerals exhibit unique properties that are crucial to their role in the manufacturing process and functionality of many electronic products such as computers, cell phones, and printers. This work focuses on using a bottom up model to quantify conflict mineral content within LaserJet printers and uses a market analysis to compare the conflict mineral composition between various IT products in order to obtain a measurement of impact the conflict minerals have in their respective IT product. On the global scale, the model estimates the market share of tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold in printers to be 1.44%, 0.083%, 0.017%, and 16.5%, respectively. These results indicate a strong potential and improvement for the development of redefined materials selection processes for manufacturers of IT products in using alternative solutions or substitute materials. Current work in this field shows that it is imperative for future work to focus on decreasing the market share of these conflict minerals and shifting manufacturing focus to developing new conflict-free electronic products.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Lee, Jason S., S.B. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Elsa A. Olivetti.

• Materials Science and Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/89969

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/89969