A Risk Assessment of Common Material Groups with Regards to their Content of Conflict Metals

Sammanfattning: Trade involving tantalum, tin, tungsten and gold, summarized as "3TG", has during the last 15 years, contributed to the armed conflict in the Democratic republic of the Congo (DRC) and surrounding countries. These metals are also referred to as conflict metals or as conflict minerals. In 2012 the United states congress passed section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank act. According to the Dodd-Frank act, companies listed on the U.S stock markets, including ABB, must declare the use of functional amounts of any of the 3TG-metals in their products or production. The purpose of this project was to ease the work of locating functional amounts of conflict metals in ABB's products. The aim was to find, compress and compile information about common industrial materials in a structured way. This was done by creating a manual that presents the investigated materials and their risk of containing 3TG. The scope of the manual was to look at solid materials with a starting point in metals, ceramics and polymers. Groups of materials such as wood, paper and bioceramics have been excluded from the search due to lacking relevance for ABB. The resulting manual covers a large variety of materials, especially materials used in power products. The scope of this manual can, in the future, be expanded as well as the investigation of the researched materials. The base structure for this manual supports further expansion and adaptation since the information gathered is stored in a database.