“…But for consumers eager to act on this new knowledge, two problems emerge.

The first is that the large American companies which sell the finished product do not deal with the mines directly.

Those companies buy parts from smaller companies, which in turn often buy the minerals after they have been mined. That makes it difficult to determine where the minerals originated - and easy for companies to establish plausible deniability.

“Manufacturers really have done quite a lot to create a system that absolves themselves,” says Josh Dorfman, creator of the Lazy Environmentalist website.

The second, larger, problem, is that there is no true conflict-free phone or laptop currently on the market….”