Fair electronics?

We have fair trade coffee, clothes, gravestones and wedding rings. But what about computer, smartphone and accessoirs?

Idea

We would like to follow other branches in their development towards fair trade products. In branches like food, (tea, coffee, chocolate,...) and clothes, it has become a matter of course to find fair trade alternatives in many daily use shops. However, looking at the starting point of this development we can observe that it is not the established industry that starts improving the situation when human rights violations in the supply chain are found to be a problem. In fact small small projects come up showing a better way of production and supply chain management, paying attention to human rights. And then, once the way has become smoother and the market is known to be big enough, bigger companies join the show by broadening their product line with a fair trade product.

Our plan is to repeat this story for the electronics industry with the help of our so far partly fair mouse. As long as there is no alternative to unfairly produced electronics, we can not count on bigger companies for real change, for without sustainable alternative there is no risk to them of loosing their market share. We hope to kick-start a fair trade electronics market so that one day caring customers have the possibility to choose the fair option for every product they need.

How to reach this

It seems impossible to create a mouse which is definitely free of all exploitation in its product chain in one go, so we are approaching our goal step by step and having started with a computer mouse which is fair in parts, followed by an even fairer version (see supply chain). However, the next version will contain even more fair components and the next next one will again be fairer and so on until we can realise a mouse produced under good working conditions throughout the whole production process, a fair computer mouse. This means that the current version of the mouse is not fully fair, but by far the fairest mouse (actually the fairest consumer electronics product) available. To support the project you can buy the mouse here.

More information on the mouse
Realisation
Definition of 'fair'