The mass deployment of electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines around the world has raised a pressing question for environmentalists and human rights defenders: how to ensure that the materials needed to manufacture cleantech are produced sustainably and responsibly?

From the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia to Chile and Indonesia, the race to mine more minerals pivotal to the energy transition such as lithium, nickel, cobalt and copper has led to growing environmental destruction, deforestation and social conflict.

The cleantech companies that use them are increasingly coming under pressure from end-product manufacturers and governments to demonstrate that the metals and minerals entering their supply chains have been sourced responsibly without contributing to conflict or human rights abuses.

But transparent and verified information about the origins of these materials is often in short supply.

“Whether it be the iron that’s going into steel, the rare earths going into magnets, the lithium going into batteries, this is a sector that has largely had no transparency with respect to their supply chains,” Cameron Scadding, CEO and managing director at Source Certain, told Climate Home News.

That is what the Western Australian company is working to change.

Source Certain specialises in verifying the origin of minerals, food and timber using scientific tools and forensic investigation techniques. By reading the chemistry of a piece of ore or a mineral inside a product, it can trace it back to the mine where it was extracted.

“If we genuinely want to be better to the environment, we absolutely cannot do that without knowing where this stuff comes from… how it’s been mined or how it’s been processed,” Scadding said in an interview from his home in Perth.

The technique allows companies, regulators and governments to verify information about the origin and sourcing of a product. This can help expose illicit trade, hold companies’ sustainability claims to account and could help respond to mounting calls to make mineral supply chains more transparent and traceable.

A supply chain integrity test

A forensic and analytical chemist, Scadding founded Source Certain more than a decade ago with a focus on the origin of food and agricultural products.

Since then, Source Certain has helped expose the presence of Chinese tomatoes picked using forced labour in “Italian” tomato puree, found mislabelled seafood on supermarket shelves, and helped to prevent Ukrainian wheat stolen from Russian-controlled territories finding a route to market.

Consumers may not share the same emotional connection with how their food is produced and where the rare earths in their EVs come from, but for Scadding, the challenge is equally urgent.

“The whole idea of the energy transition is that we can, through technology, move away from oil and gas and carbon-intensive industries. But that actually stacks up [only] if we do it ethically and sustainably, because otherwise it’s a roundabout of sustainability problems.”

Source Certain verifies companies’ claims on the origin of their minerals by analysing a sample and comparing it to the geological profile of the mine where it was supposedly extracted.

To do this, it uses a technology known as fingerprinting, which was first developed to trace the source of gold and help identify fake metal.

As minerals form, they absorb traces of elements from their environment. By analysing this elemental profile and creating a distinctive pattern, scientists can match the mineral to the specific place where it came out of the ground and provide context over how it was mined.

This investigative approach makes it possible to verify a product’s origin along different points of the supply chain in what Scadding described as “an integrity test”. Source Certain then supports the company checking the materials to understand and act on its findings.

In principle, the same technology can be used to find out, for example, where in the world a piece of copper has come from without any additional information. But that would require a much lengthier and more complicated forensic investigation, said Scadding.

Looking for mines and factories’ fingerprints

Source Certain is already offering the service at scale for the gold industry. The work is more complex for metals such as lithium that are transformed before they are used in technologies like batteries. But it is still possible to verify the integrity of the product at various points of the mineral’s transformation, said Scadding.

Mines, refineries and factories all leave their fingerprint on the materials – a trail of clues that can help confirm whether what the company claims about the item’s provenance is true.

But doing this can only help improve sustainability if the company has measures in place to control what enters its supply chain. “We can’t go in and make a supply chain have integrity. All we can do is test and verify,” Scadding told Climate Home.

“If you do not know where your product has come from and you cannot verify it, then there should be no claims on that product from a sustainability basis,” said Scadding. Otherwise, he added, “you’re almost certainly greenwashing”.

The case for more regulation

The Australian firm already counts miners, refiners and end-product manufactures among its customers, including in the rare earths industry, which supplies materials used in magnets for EV motors and wind turbines. In 2021, it partnered with British company Cornish Lithium to verify the origin of UK-mined lithium in batteries.

Now, with backing from British venture capital firm Greensphere, the company wants to scale and expand its presence in the UK and EU markets, which have adopted more stringent due diligence requirements for supply chains – although some EU regulations are at risk of being watered down.

Globally, Scadding said some progress has been made to improve the transparency of mineral supply chains: due diligence regulation is catching up and companies are increasingly motivated to manage the risks to their business.

But more could still be done to understand the environmental and social risks these supply chains carry.

A recent assessment by the International Energy Agency and the OECD found that measures encouraging traceability in critical mineral supply chains are on the rise but mostly affect manufacturing companies and retailers at the end of the value chain.

In addition, very few require scientific verification of the materials’ origins.

Knowing where a product is from is fundamental to any due diligence framework, said Scadding.

“What we want regulation to do is make it mandatory that companies actually go and look at what is happening within their supply chains and check what they are being told,” he said. That could include scientific testing alongside other due diligence measures, such as audits and creating digital documentation trails of an item’s journey along the supply chain.

“Scientific testing provides unique insights and in most cases – a surprise to most of our clients – is that it is more cost-effective and easier to implement than most of the other digital offerings,” he added.

Main image: Source Certain CEO Cameron Scadding at the company’s testing laboratory in Western Australia (Photo: Source Certain)

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The company tracking energy transition minerals back to the mines