If you own a mobile, it's probably held together by tin from the Indonesian island of Bangka. Mining is wrecking the environment and every year it claims dozens more lives
Official police figures show that mining accidents such as Suge's have quadrupled in the past two years, with the number of deaths increasing from 21 in 2010 to 44 in 2011. But activists say the number of dead actually averages around 100-150 every year, with many cases going unreported. Suge is lucky that his employer – a private mine operator that supplies tin to Timah – is paying him regular compensation and has offered to give him his job back once his leg heals. But compensation is a rare privilege in an industry in which most miners fend for themselves, says Ratno Budi of the Bangka-Belitung branch of Indonesian environment group Walhi. Suge calls the opportunity a "second life" and expects to begin mining again next year.
Suge doesn't have a mobile phone, so he uses a friend's to tell us the news: he doesn't want any visitors and he won't talk. His boss has told him not to say anything. They're neighbours and the mine's just up the road and he needs this job – the job he hopes to go back to when he gets better, inshallah – because mining is good money. Everything is OK. Just please don't come.
We leave at dawn. In the black morning sky the two-lane highway cuts west across the island towards Suge's village, a cluster of wooden and cinderblock houses near mangroves so deep the palm trees look like drowned bonsais. There are mosques with orange gates and lime roofs, clapboard shacks selling sweets to schoolchildren, and then, every so often, vast expanses of seeming desert.
A tin miner in Bangka, Indonesia, where 20% of locals are miners and another 40% work in related industries. Photograph: Ulet Ifansasti/Friends Of The Earth
There is a chain here: Bangka and Belitung produce 90% of Indonesia's tin, and Indonesia is the world's second-largest exporter of the metal. A recent Businessweek investigation into tin mining in Bangka found that Indonesia's national tin corporation, PT Timah, supplies companies such as Samsung directly, as well as solder makers Chernan and Shenmao, which in turn supply Foxconn (which manufactures many Appleproducts). Chernan has also supplied Samsung, Sony and LG. So it is highly likely that the smartphone or tablet you use has Bangkanese tin in it, perhaps mined by Suge or one of the many tens of thousands of men like him, most of whom earn around £5 a day in a local industry that fetches roughly £42m of revenue for Indonesia every year.
Official police figures show that mining accidents such as Suge's have quadrupled in the past two years, with the number of deaths increasing from 21 in 2010 to 44 in 2011. But activists say the number of dead actually averages around 100-150 every year, with many cases going unreported. Suge is lucky that his employer – a private mine operator that supplies tin to Timah – is paying him regular compensation and has offered to give him his job back once his leg heals. But compensation is a rare privilege in an industry in which most miners fend for themselves, says Ratno Budi of the Bangka-Belitung branch of Indonesian environment group Walhi. Suge calls the opportunity a "second life" and expects to begin mining again next year.
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