As Georgina Fleming explains, SYSTEMIQ’s investment in Circulor means more manufacturers can be sure of sourcing ethical and low-carbon materials. SYSTEMIQ joins Circulor’s funding round with Volvo Cars, Total Carbon Neutrality Ventures, and Plug and Play.
SYSTEMIQ, a B Corporation founded to drive the achievement of the Paris Agreement and UN Sustainable Development Goals, has invested into Circulor, a traceability-as-a-service company that verifies responsible sourcing and processing of minerals and other industrial supply chain materials.
Circulor employs technologies to improve the transparency and resilience of industrial supply chains. Customers use Circulor to verify ethical sourcing at mines, ensure effective recycling, and to attribute CO2 footprint and other impact metrics to the flow of materials within their supply chains.
“Traceability and digitisation are key to facilitating ethical and low-carbon sourcing and production for an increasingly complex web of global supply chain actors,” says Georgina Fleming, Investment Director at SYSTEMIQ. “As strategic investors, we look forward to working closely with the team to help accelerate the transition to sustainable supply chains in the fields of electric mobility and plastics recycling.”
SYSTEMIQ is already working with Circulor on developing the concept of a ‘passport’ to provide a mechanism for sharing data on the origin of a battery’s materials. Next-generation batteries are a crucial enabler for decarbonising the mobility and power sectors: they could enable 30% of the reduction needed in those sectors to stay within the two-degree warming scenario outlined in the Paris Agreement. Yet battery manufacturing processes remain energy-intensive, and a rising demand for materials such as cobalt raises social and environmental concerns around their extraction. Here’s where circular economy approaches can help, lowering life-cycle costs and reducing annual greenhouse gas emissions from battery production by around 20%.
“We hope to see Circulor as the first of several complimentary investments in the mobility space,” says Georgina. “For SYSTEMIQ, systems change means building an ecosystem of solutions to transition towards a circular, low-carbon economy.”
Circulor’s clients include Volvo Cars, CATL and LG Chem, which deploy Circulor’s technology to trace minerals such as cobalt and mica for electric vehicle battery packs. Circulor is also supported by strong strategic partners including SGS, the world’s leading inspection, verification, testing and certification company; and Kumi, a sustainability consultancy that specialises in responsible supply chains. For more information, please visit https://www.circulor.com/
