Trouble is most of the products are fungible. You buy the stuff from a reputable mine and the other buyers will just buy the same stuff from the conflict zone. Its a way to feel better but the practical way to stop the thugs with guns stealing resources in the conflict zones is to do it more directly.
Although it's clear that Intel is addressing the very valid concerns people have always had about coltan, there are a lot of good comments in this thread about the vagueness of "conflict free." Perhaps a more interesting and useful metric would be a "living wage supply chain," where everyone involved has been paid enough money to lead at least a lower-middle-class lifestyle. I don't have any clue how this would work, but hey -- this is an online comment, not an economics paper!<p>Of course you'd have companies claiming that $1/day is middle class in certain countries, etc, so maybe you'd have to set some sort of standardized chart based on CPI, but y'all get what I'm saying here. I think it would be more informative than "conflict-free", especially since it gets to the root of ensuring a lack of slave-labor-like conditions for workers. Most of the fashion industry, for example, would never manage to hold itself to such a standard. "Made in Italy" is a lot more expensive when you can't pay table scraps to your Chinese "guest workers"...
Does this also entail that no Saudi Arabian [0] or American fossil fuels will be used in the entire supply chain?<p>[0] <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/24/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-right-saudi-arabia-more-focused-con/" rel="nofollow">http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/...</a>