The problem of conflict minerals: A review of current approaches and a web 3.0 inspired road ahead

【Author】 Kapoor, Ishaan; Pratt-Rogers, William; Kahraman, Muhammet Mustafa

【Source】RESOURCES POLICY

【影响因子】8.222

【Abstract】Responsible sourcing of mineral inputs to manufactured goods is a significant problem in today's world. Ill -sourced minerals not only finance terrorism, human trafficking, and other major issues in society, but they deter deliberately conscientious organizations from their goals of achieving genuinely sustainable products that are considerate towards the environment and society. This paper aims to understand the problem of responsible sourcing from the point of view of the mining and the metallurgical industry. The study helps identify areas of improvement for this global industry to minimize conflict originating from natural resource development and achieve the noble goal of being certified as Conflict Free. Further, existing paths to accreditation are classified into three categories: Certification Approaches, Analytical Approaches, and Inscription Approaches. A compar-ison of the approaches is given on parameters like accuracy, cost of implementation, and difficulty of imple-mentation. The study finds that although Analytical Approaches appear to be the most feasible among all the other approaches, their extremely high cost of implementation has prevented their wide adoption, thus perpetuating the difficulty of systematically managing the problem of conflict minerals at scale. Finally, the use of Blockchain Technology (BCT) to overcome the limitations of current mineral traceability schemes is given. Due to limited academic research on this topic, the focus was diverted to how other industries have utilized BCT and proposed the next steps for mineral researchers.

【Keywords】Blockchain; Mineral provenience; Mineral traceability; Distributed ledger; Sustainability; Supply chain management

【发表时间】2022 DEC

【收录时间】2022-11-28

【文献类型】理论模型

【主题类别】

区块链应用-虚拟经济-金融领域