Circular System for Assessing Rare Earth Sustainability (CSyARES)

Rare-earth metals are irreplaceable in highly demanded products such as wind turbines, electric vehicles, mobile phones, computers and the defence industry. Therefore, we need to research how to sustainably mine and process these metals.

Circularise together with BEC GmbH, Grundfos, Minviro, and the global Rare Earth Industry Association (REIA) started a research project in February 2022. The research aims to develop a blockchain-based traceability circular system to improve transparency and sustainability of supply chains involving critical and rare earth materials.

Current challenge in the REE industry  

Rare earth elements (REE) are essential for the transition towards a circular economy and a critical component of many green technology solutions such as energy-efficient lights, wind turbines, hybrid and fully electric vehicles.

While these metals are critical to drive sustainability targets forward, there is no certification or standard for socio-environmental reporting to assess sustainability across the REE value chain.

REE resource availability is not unlimited and its extraction and processing also comes with an environmental footprint.

Therefore there is a clear necessity to establish industry-wide sustainability criteria and schemes to actually certify sustainability accordingly. To reach this goal, the transparency and traceability of the REE value chains needs to be given.

Read more on conflict minerals and the EU Conflict Minerals Regulation in our blog.

Objectives of the project

The Circular System for Assessing Rare Earth Sustainability (CSyARES) project's objective is to improve raw materials supply conditions for the EU economy and the world market (Improved international resource transparency and governance leads to stability, predictability, resource-efficiency and hence a better foundation for competitiveness on a sustainable basis).

The project is an industry initiative which aims to create a standardised sustainability certification for rare earth elements as well as a software system to improve data transfer between supply chain actors.

CSyARES intends to integrate REIA’s sustainability standards for REE with Circularise's blockchain-based traceability software and Minviro's sustainability metrics. The integrated solution provides affordable confidentiality-preserving certification to suppliers, proving their sustainability metrics. Grundfos and BEC GmbH will then test this solution to trace and measure the environmental impact of their supply chains.

Overall, this project:

1. scales the blockchain system for supply chain transparency and decentralised certification to serve the whole supply chain;
2. upscales REIA’s standard for sustainable performance along the supply chain;
3. integrates the REIA standard with Minviro’s LCA tool and Circularise’s traceability technology;
4. demonstrates the system and business model of sustainable sourcing via collaboration with Grundfos and BEC GmbH and members of REIA. Circularise and Minviro will implement the software on supply chain transparency and generate LCAs for the environmental impacts of example supply chains.

Circularise's role

Circularise takes the lead of the consortium for CSyARES. Circularise offers its blockchain-based traceability solution to provide certified transparency about the origin of materials, production processes, sustainability and material properties along the rare earth supply chain. 

Circularise will develop an extension of its supply chain traceability software system to specifically support the needs and standards of the REE industry. Therefore Circularise will digitise REIAs sustainable mining standards. In addition, the software will integrate with Minviro directly to receive LCA data from the LCA platform focused on the upstream supply chain and communicate it to downstream partners. 

The REE-focused dashboard will allow the communication of all standards (not just recycled content) of REE supply chains including energy savings and labour conditions and provenance. Furthermore it will enable the direct input of production process and material data for the calculation of LCAs. 

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