Right to repair | This Week in Business

04.08.2023 - 14:55 / gamesindustry.biz

This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check back every Friday for a new entry.

This week we published our ninth annual conflict minerals report on the industry's efforts to source the materials it needs without fueling armed conflict and human rights abuses.

It's a bummer of an article even in the years where the industry posts significant progress on that front, and dear reader, this was not one of those years.

Microsoft and GameStop showed deeply concerning backsliding on their supply chains for conflict minerals (gold, tin, tungsten, and tantalum), and only one of the ten companies we looked at – Logitech – showed any improvement year-over-year.

And that's just the results for the part of the supply chain they're legally required to tell us about. These reports generally don't cover companies' supply chains for other minerals often found in electronics like zinc (which has been tied to slave labor), iron (armed conflict), mica (slave labor), and cobalt (slave labor).

But as I put together this year's report, I kept coming back to a line from last year's report.

QUOTE | "I think at some point we need to just recognize that we use too much minerals, and maybe the main focus should be on recycling and decreasing the amount of minerals we use." - Raphael Deberdt of the Responsible Sourcing Network, a charitable organization dedicated to ending human rights abuses associated with raw material supply chains.

For years, we've held up Apple and Google as some of the best in the industry for ethical sourcing of conflict minerals because of their vigilance over their supply chains and reliance on smelters and refiners that have passed third-party conflict-free audits.

But I'm not sure they should be applauded for ethically sourcing minerals when their design decisions lead to those painstakingly extracted minerals being tossed into a landfill in the not-too-distant future.

STAT | 3,851 – The number of Oakland Unified School District Chromebooks that were rendered useless in the past year because Google stopped providing software updates for them, blocking basic apps and websites in the process, according to a San Jose Mercury News report.

Oakland Unified estimates it will have 40,000 more of these expired Chromebooks on its hands over the next five years, and that's just a single school district in a single state. About 50% of surveyed school district leaders across the US said they used Chromebooks across all their schools.

STAT | 18 months – The length of time some people had their original Apple AirPod wireless earbuds