Critical Minerals Traceability and Sustainability

other

Project Details

P1118

#2303032

.. / .. / 

1.0

2023-04-14

2024-04-14

2025-01-14

Project Purpose

 In line with the UN sustainability goals and building on the success of the Textile & Leather traceability project, this project proposal seeks to develop a traceability and sustainability framework for critical raw materials (CRM¹). This project supports the UN focus on extractive industries and builds on the UN/CEFACT role & capabilities to deliver digital standards for sustainable supply chains.

 The purpose of this project is to uplift verifiable critical raw materials supply chain resilience and sustainabilitythrough digital standards for data and trust. 

• Resilient supply chains are designed to avoid risky dependencies and can withstand disruptions. 
• Sustainable supply chains are designed to minimize environmental impacts and maximise human welfare.

 Both goals are met through traceability and transparency measures that this project will support through standardization.  There are already many supply chain traceability platforms on the market. None will dominate the world’s supply chains and so must improve their interoperability so that supply chains can be traced across multiple independent platforms.  This is the primary purpose of this project – namely to focus on the exchange of supply chain information between platforms.

 This project will

• Leverage the experience from the UN/CEFACT textile & leather project (https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-01/ECE-TRADE-463E.pdf) but also accommodate the lessons learned (for example that there are 1000’s of platforms for traceability but what matters for complex supply chains is interoperability between platforms).
• Leverage the recent UN/CEFACT project deliverables including the recommendations on digital trust using verifiable credentials (https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-09/WhitePaper_VerifiableCredentials-CBT.pdf) as well as the representation of UN/CEFACT semantics as a modern web vocabulary (https://vocabulary.uncefact.org/)
• Leverage the experience of participating nations in their various national and subnational efforts to digitalise their CRM supply chains, whether as producer or consumer.  One example is the British Columbia Ministry of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation work on digital trust.
• Work with existing industry groups and consortia that are working in the CRM space.
• Ensure that the framework includes sufficient digital trust so that sustainability claims associated with critical minerals supply chains can be verified and trusted, thereby tackling the increasing incidence of greenwashing and mass-balance fraud.
• Be specific about the role of national and subnational governments and accreditation authorities as “trust anchors” in the network of supply chain actors.
• Ensure that the framework supports both supply chain sustainability and resilience goals of producer and consumer economies.
• Deliver a cross-border traceability framework for CRM that provides the necessary standards guidance to permit end-to-end critical minerals digital traceability across different commercial and national boundaries – for example from lithium mine to rechargeable battery.
• Test the framework via proof-of-concept implementations between at least three nations. 

Critical raw materials are part of our daily lives and paramount to the functioning of our industrial ecosystems (digital, transport, construction, renewable energy technologies, lightweight); for instance, tungsten in phones, lithium in batteries, gallium and indium in LED lamps, rare-earth elements in magnets for digital technologies, electric vehicles and wind generators. Such minerals are “critical” as they represent the most economically important raw minerals with a high supply risk and are concentrated in few geographical areas. Considering cost-benefit aspects and a risk-based approach (for CRMs sourced in conflict-affected states), traceability and transparency tools will be key to support sustainable, resilient and resource-efficient of CRMs. Transparency and traceability would also support addressing unintended consequences, social and environmental sustainability-related issues stemming from heavy metal pollution, resource depletion and habitat destruction.

Project Scope

This project will deliver a suite of materials that support national policy makers, CRM industry actors, and traceability technology providers. 

• A stakeholder mapping and engagement strategy to support a call for participation that will attract strong participation.
• A guidance document that provides an overview of business drivers, high level business requirements, and implementation guidance for a CRM traceability framework.
• A reference trust graph that models the supply chain participant roles, the credential types exchanged, and the role of governments as trust anchors.
• A harmonized sustainability vocabulary for CRM that builds on existing work from the International Trade Centre (https://standardsmap.org/en/identify) and other relevant work.
• A suite of standard credential schema to support each certificate type identified during the requirements gathering. These define the interoperability boundary between participating supply chain platforms.
• Analysis of mechanisms to link the physical goods to the digital twin via such methods as chemometric or radiographic markings – and subsequent recommendations to nations.
• A test suite that can be used by implementers to verify conformance with the credential standards.

Project Deliverables

The project deliverables are:

• Deliverable 1: Policy Recommendation
• Deliverable 2: Business Requirement Specification
• Deliverable 3: Guidelines
• Deliverable 4: Executive Guide
• Deliverable 5: JSON-LD vocabulary
• Deliverable 6: Credential Schema
• Deliverable 7: Other (specify) Test harness 

Exit Criteria

The exit criteria will be

• Exit Criteria for Deliv. 1: Public Review logs demonstrating all comments have been satisfactorily resolved; Final document ready for publication.
• Exit Criteria for Deliv. 2: Public Review logs demonstrating all comments have been satisfactorily resolved; Final document ready for publication.
• Exit Criteria for Deliv. 3 and 4: Final document ready for publication
• Exit Criteria for Deliv. 5 and 6: Final deliverable ready for publication and for Bureau approval

Project Team Membership and Required Functional Expertise

Geographical Focus

Initial Contributions

This project builds upon work already completed by UNECE and partner organisations.

• Rec 46 - https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-01/ECE-TRADE-463E.pdf
• T & L BRS - https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2021-03/BRS-Traceability-Transparency-TextileLeather-Part1-HLPDM_v1.pdf
• VC White paper - https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-09/WhitePaper_VerifiableCredentials-CBT.pdf
• Supply chain vocabulary - https://vocabulary.uncefact.org/
• GS1 CBV & EPCIS 2.0 - https://www.gs1.org/standards/epcis
• ITC Standards mapping - https://standardsmap.org/en/identify

 Furthermore, there are a number of industry and national groups already working in the CRM space that may participate and contribute.  This include but are not limited to :

• https://www.ameslab.gov/cmi The Critical Materials Institute is a U.S. DOE Energy Innovation Hub led by Ames National Laboratory that seeks to accelerate innovative scientific and technological solutions to develop resilient and secure supply chains for rare-earth metals and other materials critical to the success of clean energy technologies.
• https://www.global-reia.org The Rare Earth Industry Association (REIA) is a global organization with partners representing the whole REE value chain. It aims to develop a transparent, sustainable and integrated value chain for REEs.
• https://www.internationaltin.org/tin-supply/ supporting the tin industry and expanding tin use.  A primary goal is to ensure an innovative, competitive, and sustainable supply chain and market for tin.
• https://www.cobaltinstitute.org This is a global industry association focused on promoting the sustainable and responsible use of cobalt, a critical mineral used in a variety of industries, including batteries, aerospace, and defense.
• https://www.gold.org This is an international association of gold mining companies focused on promoting responsible and sustainable mining practices and the use of gold in various industries, including electronics, jewelry, and investment.

Resource Requirements

Participants in the project shall provide resources for their own participation. The existence and functioning of the project shall not require any additional resources from the UNECE secretariat. Note that additional secretariat resources may be required or this project (community engagement, specialist advice, implementation testing) however these additional resources will be funded via contributions from some project member organisations (government & commercial).