Traceability

Too many of the modern-day critical minerals depend on supply chains that include child labour, forced labour and money that finances armed groups. We will not trade in material from those supply chains, and the only way to be certain is to know, lot by lot, where ours comes from and whose hands it has passed through. Traceability is how two of our founding values become something we can prove: protecting and improving human rights, and creating fair value and transparent supply chains.

It matters just as much to our customers. The manufacturers who build our metals into phones, cars, aircraft and medical devices are accountable for every mineral in their products: to regulators, to auditors and to the people who buy from them. A refiner can only give them that assurance if the evidence starts at the mine. That is why we designed and incubated Original Evidence. It has since grown into an arm's-length upstream traceability system, validated on a blockchain and enhanced by AI. It records every mined lot as it moves, from the ground to the refinery and on to the buyer, so that where the material came from, who has held it, what it is and which documents travel with it can be verified from start to finish.

We set out to reimagine mineral traceability because the existing schemes were failing. Their weaknesses had led to highly publicised allegations of mineral laundering across the industry, while the mining companies upstream were objecting, with good reason, to the high price they paid to take part.

We built and spun out Original Evidence to solve the problems of cost, credibility and control. It was designed around the people who use it, borrowing its methods from anti-money-laundering practice in the financial industry and protecting its data to the standard a bank would expect. It has been a clear departure from the paper-based and software-first schemes that came before it, which built a platform first and left the industry to fit itself poorly around it. It is free to licensed miners in Rwanda, and it is the same system our partners use through the Supply Chain Transformation Program, so their material arrives with the same evidence as our own.

How a lot is recorded

• Know your counterpart. Every miner, trader and buyer in the chain is identified before they can move material: company and licence data, beneficial owners, and screening against international sanctions lists.
• On-the-ground assessment. Every mine site is visited in person each year and assessed against the risks set out in Annex II of the OECD Due Diligence Guidance.
• Chain of custody. Every movement is requested digitally, approved by the national mining regulator, witnessed at loading and at delivery, and carried with a QR-coded transit pass that can be checked anywhere on the road.
• A record that cannot be rewritten. Each event is written to an audit trail that cannot be changed after the fact. A correction is a new entry, so the history becomes part of the record.

Who sees how much

Original Evidence has a public layer and a private layer. The public layer shows that a lot exists, where it came from, that its custody is unbroken and that its documents are present. The private layer is the full record, shown only to counterparties we have identified, screened and approved, and every approval is made by a named person.