The stakes are higher than they might appear. Life cycle assessment, or LCA, is the standardised method for quantifying the potential environmental impacts of products and services from raw material extraction through manufacturing, use, and disposal. Yet the method has long been constrained by limited access to primary data, meaning company-specific, measurement-based information. Most practitioners instead rely on secondary life cycle inventory datasets that often lack geographical, temporal, and technological representativeness. Previous studies have documented the consequences: assessments of electric mobility are hampered by scarce primary data for battery raw material supply chains, and researchers have repeatedly flagged persistent challenges in traceability and interoperability across inventory databases. The field has recurrently called for better access to primary data, along with standardised metadata covering temporal representativeness, location, technology specifications, and energy sources.

This is where digital product passports enter the picture. Originally conceived to support supply chain traceability, regulatory compliance, and circular economy objectives, passports could in principle reduce reliance on outdated secondary datasets by embedding harmonised, machine-readable, product-level information on material composition, product characteristics, and environmental indicators. The relationship is potentially bidirectional: while passports improve access to verifiable product-level data, LCA offers a science-based, standardised methodological framework for structuring and interpreting that information, including established principles for defining system boundaries and assessing data quality. The Leiden-led team set out to move beyond conceptual wish lists and ask how real, emerging passport initiatives actually perform in practice.

The 20 initiatives examined span batteries, electronics, construction products, textiles, and other material-intensive sectors, and include research projects, policy platforms, industrial implementations, and standardisation efforts. The sample was assembled purposively from publicly documented initiatives rather than as a systematic or exhaustive inventory, and the researchers grouped the LCA-relevant attributes they found into four categories: assessment results, product characteristics, production characteristics, and end-of-life characteristics. The good news is that several core attributes are now common across initiatives. Material composition, sometimes reported with absolute masses, recycled content, hazardous substances information, and product carbon footprints appear frequently and could provide a genuine basis for improved LCA practice. Notably, many of these attributes require limited incremental effort, because companies already collect them for compliance with regulations such as the restriction of hazardous substances directive and the REACH chemicals regulation.

The dominant logic across many initiatives is the exchange of aggregated product carbon footprints along the value chain. Frameworks such as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s Pathfinder and PACT, sectoral standards like Together for Sustainability in the chemical industry, and the automotive data space Catena-X all follow a similar inheritance-based calculation model: each supply chain actor calculates a cradle-to-gate carbon footprint based on its own processes, passes the aggregated result downstream, and the next user multiplies the received figure by the quantity of input product to derive its own footprint. This approach reduces the reporting burden considerably, but it creates comparability challenges. Consistent use of carbon footprints requires alignment in methodological and modelling choices, such as system boundaries and background inventory datasets, which is difficult to guarantee in heterogeneous supply chains. Although sectoral guidelines like the Catena-X carbon footprint rulebook and the Global Battery Alliance calculation framework attempt harmonisation, the researchers found that the analysed initiatives prioritise technical interoperability and data exchange formats over full end-to-end methodological alignment.

The deeper problem is granularity. Aggregated carbon footprints mask the processes, technological parameters, geographical conditions, and operational behaviours that drive environmental impacts. For most LCA-based decisions, such aggregation is overly simplified: researchers need process-specific data to identify impact hotspots across a product life cycle, assess whether impacts are merely shifted elsewhere, or design mitigation strategies. Yet generating and sharing process-specific inventory data is genuinely difficult in practice. It increases reporting burden, requires frequent updates, and may expose commercially sensitive information such as production efficiencies and technology choices. The trade-off, the authors argue, is not only technical but organisational and governance-related: the data that is most informative for LCA is often also the least shareable within supply chains. Some passport architectures already include tiered access rights to manage this tension, restricting detailed data to accredited actors such as regulators or auditors, which strengthens verification but may limit broader analytical use.

The asymmetry extends across life cycle stages. The analysed initiatives predominantly capture upstream and mid-stream product attributes, while providing limited coverage of production conditions, use-stage performance, and end-of-life outcomes. Factory energy use and sources, geographical and temporal metadata, and end-of-life parameters appear far less frequently than composition data. The researchers emphasise that this is not simply a design flaw but reflects structural differences in data controllability. Upstream and mid-stream information sits closer to the manufacturer’s sphere of influence and is often already collected for procurement, compliance, traceability, or quality control. In contrast, use and end-of-life outcomes depend on factors beyond direct producer control, including user behaviour, local infrastructure, and downstream waste management systems. As a result, downstream information in current passports mainly reflects intended use conditions, repair guidance, or recyclability claims rather than measured outcomes, marking a structural boundary to what passports can realistically provide at the point of product placement.

End-of-life modelling deserves particular attention. In LCA practice, end-of-life modelling combines factual data, such as recycling or landfilling rates, with scenario assumptions. If end-of-life impacts are embedded within an aggregated carbon footprint, they must be sufficiently disaggregated to separate assumed downstream scenarios from upstream processes. But dynamic, product-specific end-of-life performance data is rarely available in verifiable form and generally falls outside the practical scope of passport systems. Downstream actors are unlikely to feed operational data into individual passports, and many end-of-life outcomes are inherently modelled rather than measured. The authors caution that expecting passports to resolve these limitations risks conflating product-level information systems with broader waste-system monitoring infrastructures. Instead, they argue, passports should frame end-of-life information as scenario input: structured guidance on plausible product-specific pathways that supports more consistent downstream assumptions without exceeding industry’s reporting capacity.

The way forward, according to the team, involves embedding established LCA principles directly into passport data models. That means integrating system boundaries, functional units, provenance rules, and data quality indicators, so that passport information remains interpretable and comparable across supply chains. Transparency in current LCA practice is itself uneven, with many datasets in widely used inventory databases lacking accessible documentation, consistent metadata, or traceable sources. Passports could help by requiring product-level data in machine-readable, interoperable formats with explicit provenance and methodological metadata, and by clearly labelling proxy data that can be replaced when verified primary information becomes available. Verification itself should be understood in a differentiated sense, ranging from self-declared and documented data to audited or measured values. Passports cannot eliminate diversity in LCA practice, the authors note, but they can make that diversity visible and auditable, turning opaque uncertainty into an attribute that can be examined and managed. Dynamic update mechanisms, such as change logs and timestamps, could further allow passports to function as living datasets rather than static records.

Ultimately, the researchers conclude, digital product passports and life cycle assessment can be mutually reinforcing: passports offer a pathway to structured, product-level information, while LCA provides the methodological backbone for interpreting it. Realising that complementarity requires deliberate shifts in design and governance, including moving beyond aggregated indicators towards disaggregated inventory data on energy use, critical raw material intensity, and provenance, while recognising that passports should complement rather than replace existing inventory databases. Harmonised reporting conventions aligned with ISO and Product Environmental Footprint principles would make assessments more representative, transparent, and reproducible. If those shifts materialise, the humble product passport could evolve from a static compliance tool into a dynamic infrastructure for actionable sustainability assessment, one that links product information with material, environmental, and socio-economic flows for regulators, auditors, repairers, recyclers, and consumers alike.

Subject of Research: Data structuring in digital product passport initiatives and their support for life cycle assessment

Article Title: Emerging digital product passport initiatives require improved data structuring to support life cycle assessment

Article References: Liang, Y., Mogollón, J. M., Cunha, S., Donati, F., Li, C., Mintjes, B., Kleijn, R., Climent, D. M., Wang, R., Muller, S., Mas-Fons, A., Xicotencatl, B. M., & Istrate, R. (2026). Emerging digital product passport initiatives require improved data structuring to support life cycle assessment. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 30(4), 2131-2139. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00144-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00144-7

Keywords: digital product passport, life cycle assessment, life cycle inventory, product carbon footprint, circular economy, ecodesign regulation, end-of-life modelling, data quality, supply chain traceability, industrial ecology, sustainability data, EU regulation

The study’s conceptual backbone is Sustainable Supply Chain Management, a research tradition that insists sustainability must be assessed across every tier of a supply network rather than at the level of a single mill or brand. In forest-risk sectors, the authors argue, commercially significant supply chains can look efficient downstream while the bulk of their environmental burden sits upstream, embedded in plantation concessions, drained peatlands, and sourcing geographies that conventional reporting never surfaces. Aggregate indicators such as export value, certification uptake, and legality compliance, they note, provide little guidance for policy targeting because they conceal how downstream commercial performance connects to upstream ecological exposure.

To close that gap, the researchers built their analysis on the SEI-PCS Indonesia wood pulp v3.1 dataset from Trase, a system that links individual mills and trading entities to specific sourcing landscapes through modeled supply allocation. On the economic side they tracked cumulative export volume and free-on-board export value for the three corporate groups that together control approximately 96 percent of Indonesia’s pulp production capacity: Sinar Mas, Royal Golden Eagle (APRIL), and the Japanese trading house Marubeni. On the environmental side they assembled recorded deforestation exposure and concession-related emissions, including emissions from peat subsidence, peat burning, and net land-use change across traced concession portfolios.

The raw numbers alone make clear how concentrated the sector is. Between 2015 and 2022 the three groups exported 37.19 million tonnes of pulp worth 19.69 billion US dollars. Sinar Mas alone accounted for 18.44 million tonnes of exports and 10.30 billion dollars in value, alongside 41,697 hectares of recorded deforestation exposure and roughly 556.7 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent in concession-related emissions. APRIL exported 15.89 million tonnes valued at 7.86 billion dollars, associated with 34,464 hectares of deforestation exposure and 133.9 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent. Marubeni, a much smaller export channel at 2.86 million tonnes, recorded no traceable deforestation exposure or concession-related emissions within the dataset’s analytical boundary, a finding the authors interpret strictly as an absence of recorded exposure rather than proof of zero environmental impact.

Absolute figures, however, can mislead: larger actors will almost always show larger total burdens. The study therefore derives four intensity indicators that normalize recorded environmental burden by export volume and value, allowing actors of very different commercial scale to be compared against a common sectoral benchmark. When emissions are measured per tonne of exported pulp, the divergence between the two dominant groups becomes dramatic. Sinar Mas records 30.19 tonnes of CO2-equivalent per tonne of pulp, well above the sector-wide benchmark of 22.23, while APRIL records just 8.43 tonnes, placing it far below the threshold. A decomposition of the emissions data shows the contrast is driven primarily by peat-related components: Sinar Mas’s traced portfolio includes approximately 373.9 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent from peat subsidence and 189.4 million tonnes from peat burning, compared with 98.2 million and 28.4 million tonnes respectively for APRIL.

Positioning these profiles on a two-axis diagnostic matrix that plots export scale against emissions intensity, the authors assign Sinar Mas to a pronounced trade-off profile, in which high commercial performance coincides with above-threshold environmental intensity. APRIL falls into a comparatively more favorable configuration, combining high export volume with emissions intensity well below the sectoral average. Marubeni occupies a low-impact position constrained by its smaller export contribution. The authors are emphatic that these labels are heuristic screening categories, not statistical rankings, causal classifications, or determinations of regulatory compliance, and their sensitivity analysis shows that while exact quadrant assignments shift under alternative threshold specifications, the relative ordering of the actors remains stable.

The paper’s most consequential conceptual contribution is what the authors call shadow risk: the share of recorded annual deforestation across traced concession portfolios that falls outside the annual wood-pulp deforestation classification used in the SEI-PCS methodology. Of the 359,900 hectares of total recorded annual deforestation across traced portfolios during 2015 to 2022, only 102,765 hectares were classified as annual wood-pulp deforestation, leaving 257,135 hectares, or about 71.45 percent, in the coverage gap. Crucially, the authors stress that shadow risk does not imply illegal activity, concealed misconduct, or unrecorded deforestation, nor does it establish that the unclassified deforestation was caused by pulp production. It identifies, instead, a classification-coverage gap: recorded environmental exposure that current commodity-attribution systems may systematically underrepresent when assessments rely exclusively on direct pulp-linked indicators.

The implications ripple outward in two directions. Domestically, Indonesia’s carbon-governance architecture, now anchored by Presidential Regulation No. 110 of 2025 and the FOLU Net Sink 2030 target of reaching net emissions of minus 140 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent by 2030, demands verifiable links between commercial activity and upstream emissions. The authors position their intensity indicators as an upstream diagnostic support tool that can flag where verification, peatland assessment, and emissions scrutiny may be most warranted, while cautioning that the area-based shadow-risk figure cannot be converted into carbon quantities without spatially intersecting land-cover data, biomass densities, peat maps, fire records, and appropriate emission factors. Internationally, the framework speaks directly to tightening due-diligence regimes such as the European Union Deforestation Regulation, under which corporate groups with higher recorded intensity or large classification gaps may face greater evidentiary burdens in documenting the integrity of their sourcing, even though a trade-off profile demonstrates no violation in itself.

The study is candid about its limits. It rests on one traceability architecture and its modeled allocation of wood supply to mills, rather than physical tracing of individual fibres; community suppliers appear only as province-level aggregates; peat-subsidence estimates rely on standardized emission factors that recent field research suggests may overestimate emissions in some settings; and with only three corporate groups observed, no statistical generalization is possible. Social dimensions of sustainability, from labour conditions to Indigenous land rights, fall outside the operational boundary entirely. The findings are a historical comparative diagnostic for 2015 to 2022, not a real-time audit or a compliance verdict.

Even with those caveats, the research marks a meaningful shift in how forest-risk supply chains can be evaluated. By aggregating traceability data to the corporate-group level, normalizing environmental burden by economic scale, and explicitly quantifying the gap between direct commodity attribution and broader concession-portfolio exposure, the framework converts transparency data into actionable screening metrics. The authors propose extending the approach to palm oil, rubber, soy, timber, and cattle, integrating near-real-time satellite monitoring, and independently validating the shadow-risk estimate against alternative remote-sensing products. If replicated across commodities and countries, the message for regulators, buyers, and investors is clear: the deforestation footprint of a product may be far larger, or structured very differently, than its certified label suggests, and accountability systems that look only at directly linked deforestation are seeing roughly a quarter of the recorded picture.

Subject of Research: Traceability-based environmental burden and shadow-risk assessment of Indonesia's corporate pulp supply chains

Article Title: Traceability-based environmental burden indicators for Indonesia's pulp sector: Corporate-group evidence from forest-risk supply chains

Article References: Butar Butar, M. B., Nasution, S., Parinduri, A. H., & Zaen, M. (2026). Traceability-based environmental burden indicators for Indonesia's pulp sector: Corporate-group evidence from forest-risk supply chains. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 32, Article 101526. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2026.101526

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.indic.2026.101526

Keywords: Indonesia, pulp industry, deforestation, supply chain traceability, shadow risk, SEI-PCS, peatland emissions, sustainable supply chain management, corporate-group accountability, EUDR, carbon governance, forest-risk commodities

The stakes are higher than corporate paperwork suggests. Battery material purchasers on the open market increasingly compare products using reported ESG data, and downstream manufacturers such as car companies are making procurement decisions based on sustainability disclosures. A review of reports from 90 corporate entities cited in the study found that sustainability disclosures lack completeness, consistency and comparability, with wide variations in reporting practices. Meanwhile, greenwashing has come under formal scrutiny in Australia through an investigation by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, raising the reputational cost of vague or inflated claims. If the data underpinning these decisions is not comparable, the entire traceability apparatus built around responsibly produced battery minerals starts to wobble.

The research team used qualitative content analysis to extract information from eight voluntary mechanisms, including certification schemes such as the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA), Certification of Raw Minerals (CERA), Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM), the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) and the Responsible Mining Index (RMI), alongside the OECD Due Diligence Guidance on Stakeholder Engagement. They also examined three Australian federal legislative instruments: the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act 2007, the National Pollutant Inventory measure, and the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. Each mechanism was assessed against a common set of criteria covering ESG categories addressed, data types required, methodological specifications, whether reporting occurred at site or corporate level, and transparency provisions.

The findings show partial alignment with significant fragmentation underneath. Several topics, including energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, labour practices and community engagement, appeared consistently across mechanisms. Yet the depth and specificity of requirements varied enormously, particularly regarding methodology, data quality and verification expectations. Variance was especially pronounced for water, air quality, climate change, energy, waste, and habitats and mine closure indicators. Even when multiple mechanisms addressed the same category, detailed analysis revealed significant differences in how results were derived and how much information was needed to satisfy reporting expectations.

Some schemes clearly went further than others. IRMA, for example, features highly detailed descriptions and criteria for meeting individual reporting categories, specifies the frequency at which reporting should be updated, and mandates assurance requirements, with surveillance audits conducted 12 to 18 months after initial audits and re-audits every three years. It also requires public reporting of information on company websites. By contrast, GRI’s requirements for evidence supporting reported information are less prominent, and several schemes lacked any mention of public reporting or clarity about what should be disclosed publicly. Compliance grading added another layer of complexity: TSM uses levels from C to AAA, while IRMA scores a percentage based on assurance requirements met, which complicates downstream comparison across standards.

Verification and governance practices diverged just as sharply. The researchers evaluated data quality principles, informed by ISEAL credibility guidelines and prior research linking independent third-party verification to reporting credibility. Only one regulatory instrument, the NGER scheme, required third-party auditing of reported greenhouse gas accounting information. Among voluntary mechanisms, internal and third-party auditing were more prevalent but not uniformly required. DJSI requires third-party verification every four years but not for all information, TSM requires it only for some disclosures, and RMI demands public disclosure of certain data without requiring independent verification of it. On governance, IRMA, TSM, GRI and RMI were all developed under multi-stakeholder governance involving indigenous groups, worker organisations, industry, financial institutions and researchers, while CERA was developed with a limited group of consultants and universities. Only IRMA and CERA specified grievance mechanisms outright, with TSM requiring them for workers.

The study situates this fragmentation in a longer history. Sustainability reporting in mining predates the Global Reporting Initiative, founded in 1997, and stretches back at least as far as Western Mining Corporation’s 1994/95 Environmental Progress Report, developed partly using North American guidelines from 1993. Australia has had mandatory corporate environmental reporting since 1998. Yet despite three decades of evolution, ESG frameworks have not reached a level of standardisation that enables meaningful performance comparison. The International Council on Mining and Metals released a draft Consolidated Mining Standard in October 2024, merging its Mining Principles with the CopperMark, Towards Sustainable Mining and the World Gold Council standards, but the authors caution that whether consolidation solves equivalency, comparability and data quality issues remains to be seen, particularly with implementation due in 2026 and uptake uncertain.

Regulatory pressure is building from multiple directions simultaneously. The European Union’s Battery Regulation will directly affect Australian battery material producers, while the proposed Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s climate-related financial disclosure requirements signal a broader shift from voluntary towards mandatory ESG reporting. In Australia, comprehensive ESG disclosure has not yet been mandated beyond modern slavery and greenhouse gas reporting for larger companies, but a government position statement announcing an ‘Extended External Reporting regime’ hints at a future framework. Product-level platforms such as the Global Battery Alliance’s Battery Passport and the London Metal Exchange have responded to traceability demands by mandating specific reporting requirements, though their material scope remains limited.

The researchers sketch two divergent futures. In the consolidation trajectory, the proliferation of standards observed over 30 years reverses, driven by developments such as the International Sustainability Standards Board, which is working to consolidate SASB standards, TCFD recommendations, the Integrated Reporting Framework and the CDSB Framework. Industry-led consolidation is also visible in the international spread of Towards Sustainable Mining, adopted by the Minerals Council of Australia among others, and in the Copper Mark’s adaptation into Molybdenum, Nickel and Zinc Marks in 2022. However, the Consolidated Mining Standard has drawn pushback, with an open letter signed by more than 35 community groups, unions and NGOs advocating for alternatives such as IRMA, which they viewed as developed through an equal governance model, revealing tension between industry and broader stakeholders. In the proliferation trajectory, new standards emerge focused on specific concerns like modern slavery or individual commodities, potentially fragmenting along geographic lines between the USA, China and Europe, though interoperability could improve through blockchain-supported data systems and the United Nations Transparency Protocol, whose test pilots are now underway in Canada, Australia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

For Australian producers, the immediate reality is a choice between expensive workarounds. Larger companies are building bespoke concordance matrices that align reporting criteria across multiple standards, an approach that demands sizable internal sustainability teams or costly external consultants. Smaller producers, or projects still in the scoping phase, often find that investment exceeds the perceived value. Some companies adopt a single strong standard such as IRMA in the hope that it satisfies others, though the scheme’s rigour can create hesitation among producers wary of unfavourable findings. The study’s authors do not pretend to have an exhaustive picture, acknowledging that the landscape is evolving rapidly and their analysis reflects a specific moment in the FBI CRC project. But their central conclusion is clear: the current landscape exhibits moderate overlap without full standardisation, and this fragmentation risks undermining comparability and stakeholder confidence. They recommend that all stakeholders in battery material supply chains articulate the future they want when advocating for change, because whether the sector consolidates or proliferates, the credibility of every green claim attached to a battery mineral depends on it.

Subject of Research: Comparative analysis of voluntary and regulatory ESG reporting mechanisms for Australian battery mineral producers

Article Title: Battery minerals: a changing context for ESG reporting

Article References: Langdon, R., Berry, F., Lara, H. B., Giurco, D., Northey, S., Severiano, B. M., & Li, W. (2026). Battery minerals: a changing context for ESG reporting. BMC Environmental Science, 3(1), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44329-026-00046-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44329-026-00046-w

Keywords: ESG reporting, battery minerals, lithium, nickel, cobalt, mining sustainability, IRMA, greenwashing, supply chain traceability, Battery Passport, Australia, standardisation