> My only experience with this sort of tracking is compliance with "Conflict Minerals" reporting, and from that I can tell you that tracking and verifying the origin of any commodity or bulk good is nearly impossible to accomplish reliably.
This is a better written and more eloquent version of the same excuse I was ranting about in my comment. And I'm afraid my response is not as eloquent:
Bull. Shit.
This is an eminently solvable issue. Make the executives of whatever corporation personally, criminally responsible for the slavery found in their supply chain, and then: Watch the problem be solved. No, I don't know the specifics of how you do it. That's not my job. But we put men on the moon, for Christ's sake. We, creatures not gifted by nature with wings, have the ability to fly at (mostly) reasonable cost, to such a degree where the inconveniences involved in it make it boring to discuss. Everyone in the west moves around in metal boxes with smaller metal boxes within them in which we blow up fuel and air in precise mixes to travel upwards of 80 mph, largely safely. You're telling me the collected knowledge of our species cannot be leveraged to make sure that little kids aren't doing resource extraction!?
> and nobody wants to pay for the cost of verification.
THAT is the real problem, and that's also solvable by the above. I bet the executives at these companies will open the business's purse REAL FAST when it's their, actual physical ass on the line, and not just a paltry fine and firm finger-wagging from the Government.
In reply to the comment below:
> But how do you actually verify the source? Let’s assume that some amount of conflict metals are laundered through other countries, and commingled with ‘clean’ material (which is usually how it happens); how do you figure out whether your supplier is using this material? Do you just trust any documentation they provide? If not, what is it that you’d do?
I mean this is actually one application of crypto that I didn't think was brain-dead stupid. I read a paper about the potential of using blockchains to verify the integrity of materials in supply chains.
More to the point though: I said, I don't know how it's done. But I guaran-damn-tee you that if the corpos will be charged, legally, personally, for the finding of slavery in supply chains, that they will figure it out and fucking quick.
And, even moreso, once you raise the consequences of those "lapses" in ethics to such a degree, it's highly probable that the dubious sources will either improve or shut down entirely, because there will be no corporation in the West ready to do business with them anymore. The risk is simply too high for those in charge of said corporations. They will pay whatever it costs to have materials that are from properly vetted sources.
And of course, I'm not a child, there will still be issues, none of this is a silver bullet for any of it, and there will always be bad actors acting badly. However we still have murders, and we don't just... fine murderers $500 and tell them they better not do it again, despite the fact that we can't catch them all. We catch them and we punish them.