Supply Chain Traceability: Looking Beyond Greenhouse Gases

The briefing highlights the risks associated with treating critical minerals as undifferentiated commodities, noting that a lack of transparency hides environmental and social costs. It advocates for a paradigm shift toward commodity differentiation through product-level standards, tracking technology, and regulatory tightening to ensure the energy transition is just and sustainable.

• The current trade of critical minerals as undifferentiated commodities prevents the market from signaling demand for responsible products and obscures the specific labor and environmental conditions of different mines.
• Lack of traceability leads to significant sustainability failures, including child labor in the Democratic Republic of Congo where children as young as 6 earn less than $2 per day, and catastrophic mining disasters in Brazil and Hungary.
• To achieve a paradigm shift toward commodity differentiation at scale, five key actions are required: strengthening product-level standards, deploying tracking and auditing technology, aggregating demand via buyers' alliances, rallying investors' alliances, and tightening regulations and public procurement.
• Traceability is feasible, as demonstrated by Breitling, which launched a watch with all precious materials traceable to their source and aims for all its watches to be produced this way by 2025.

APA

RMI (2022). Supply Chain Traceability: Looking Beyond Greenhouse Gases. https://rmi.org/resources/supply-chain-traceability-looking-beyond-greenhouse-gases/

Chicago

RMI. Supply Chain Traceability: Looking Beyond Greenhouse Gases. 2022. https://rmi.org/resources/supply-chain-traceability-looking-beyond-greenhouse-gases/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=RMI |title=Supply Chain Traceability: Looking Beyond Greenhouse Gases |date=21 November 2022 |url=https://rmi.org/resources/supply-chain-traceability-looking-beyond-greenhouse-gases/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{rmi2022supply, author = {{RMI}}, title = {{Supply Chain Traceability: Looking Beyond Greenhouse Gases}}, institution = {RMI}, year = {2022}, month = nov, url = {https://rmi.org/resources/supply-chain-traceability-looking-beyond-greenhouse-gases/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }