The EU is doing a lot of work in this space in other fields, basically looking at products that are high risk for environmental or social issues and requiring due diligence and documentation for those products.
I develop traceability solutions for agri-food, and it's pretty impressive to see how everyone is suddenly actually really researching their supply chains in the run up to new EU deforestation laws requiring this due diligence.
Of course it's possible to debate the effects and impact of the legislation (in some cases companies may choose to bail completely on certain origins, which does little to advance environmental or social issues there), but from what I've seen so far it is acting as a catalyzing force at large organizations to start doing real due diligence efforts.
>everyone is suddenly actually really researching their supply chains in the run up to new EU deforestation laws requiring this due diligence
How effective will that be on preventing illegal deforestation? A lot of illegal deforestation in the EU(Romania) is going on under the noses of the authorities which are complicit and help the local logging mafia get clean papers for their wood, and turn a blind eye to checks and help fudge reports as it's multi hundred million Euro industry thanks to huge demand from wood manufacturers in Germany and Austria who don't care how and where that timber comes form as long as it's dirt cheap and has clean looking papers. The logging mafia has no remorse to hurt or kill people getting in between them and their 7-9 figure revenues, let alone give a toss about cooking the books or fudging some traceability reports.
Your agri-food traceability software seem more as solutions the big wood consuming mega corporations like IKEA can use to say "look, the traceability software says we're complaint, m'kay", to get out of a pickle when being caught red handed with tainted raw materials. The exact same thing is happening with the "ethically sourced" cocoa and coffee beans, which is often farmed by the same slave labor.
Unless there's heavy policing by non-corruptible third parties, across the entire supply chains, and enough guilty people go to jail to send a strong message, traceability solutions and ethically sourced stickers don't mean jack shit as the paperwork can easily be fudged by system savvy people looking to make money.
As always, it's complex. The EUDR is focused on items originating outside the single market. It does not outline specific measures or tooling, outside of mandating things like containers must be accompanied by documentation showing the specific locations of origin (polygons of fields, or GPS points if the fields are small), as well as quantities from those locations and accompanying due diligence reports, that are to (eventually) be submitted to a central repository. If they don't, the products cannot be sold on the market, and companies may be susceptible to fines.
Deforestation is something that is possible to monitor in various ways, including via satellite imagery. But some form of independent risk analysis and ground-truthing will almost certainly be part of any due-diligence process. I'm already seeing companies shy away from some 'legal' fields that are suspiciously close to protected areas that are undergoing / have undergone recent deforestation (which is also a risk, by the way, that farmers are punished for things outside their control). But what I'm saying is that right now companies either a) make their own rules, and own the communication space when they don't achieve them or b) subscribe to voluntary programs (rainforest alliance, fair trade, etc) which also have limited resources and where some conflict of interest can exist. Soon, companies will be legally responsible and this is a large culture shift, basically moving the problem from the CSR/ESG department to the sourcing department, which is where the deals are truly made.
I expect that initial enforcement will be lax as everyone gains experience and adjust to the new situation, and there will (of course) be fraud. This will probably be mostly done in origin (when Nestle says jump a chocolate exporter says 'how high?'). But soon regulatory authorities will have databases of (traceable) products to field level and can correlate... only so much of product X can come from field Y, etc. And, by virtue of companies having to implement traceability to field level, much more can be said about other issues (child labor, wages and premiums, etc). An importer can no longer say "well we can't be totally responsible for everything that happens since we don't have that level of granularity on our products."
> European authorities haven’t yet specified precisely what information a battery passport must contain, but a three-year, £7 million project called the Battery Pass Consortium is defining exactly that.
> Led by ‘system changer’ Systemiq and funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, the project’s 11 partners include car industry heavyweights such as Audi and BMW and Circulor as the tech lead.
To add more context: German car manufacturers have a bigger market share in China (especially compared to other Europeans brands). They depend on China, especially VW which invest a lot there. China already threatens to retaliate with punitive tariff (or organize a boycott as it's easy to leverage nationalism there, something like "buy Chinese, not European!") in case the European Comission does something to defend its industry against the anti-competitive dumping practices that China may use (the same tactic China used to obliterate the EU and US solar panel industries). This is why Germany is officially against the probe [0] investigating the subsidies China may have given chinese manufacturers (mainly BYD) [1], and thus why Germany may not be so (publicly) in favor of this EV passport.
Well, China didn’t industrialize through fair competition either. There’s no mythical level playing field.
Regulations is not a problem. The problem is here in europe we ain’t focusing on engineering and manufacturing culturally. Regulations can create a void but do we have what to fill it with?
Then 90% of the clothing in EU should be banned. Have you checked what's on your feet?
Pretty sure you're not wearing sneakers "Made in Germany" by unionized workers with 38h work weeks and pension plans, but more like some Nikes made by the finest sweatshop workers of Bangladesh/Pakistan/Vietnam/etc.
Why doesn't the EU look into stopping that kind of slave labor and instead focuses on the competition of Audi and BMW?
Not saying that shouldn't be taken care of, but it seems massively hypocritical by the EU to turn a blind eye to the slavery in the fast fashion industry imports for decades and suddenly wake up to it when a local industry gets some tough competition.
Oh I would absolutely 100% support regulations to force clothing companies operating in the EU to avoid slave labour and other horrific practices. Just like I (at least in principle, haven't looked into the details) support regulations to avoid similar things in EV batteries, another field that's way too comfortable with human rights abuses.
You're right that the EU is probably moving too slow on these things. But something is better than nothing.
I used to think that as well. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good and all that.
Now I see that selective enforcement is real, and extremely damaging. I no longer support tackling problems that address 1% of a phenomenon when problems that address 20% of the phenomenon exist. Otherwise it is just virtue signaling, letting the real problem continue, and pushing an unrelated agenda against the 1% offender.
>Otherwise it is just virtue signaling, letting the real problem continue, and pushing an unrelated agenda against the 1% offender.
Pretty much spot on! And the scary part is that this selective enforcement for virtue signaling works for the public, and works very well. Just look at the many bonkers and useless policies every country had in place in one form or another during the pandemic(besides the medically sane policies obviously).
People see their leaders and authorities doing $SOMETHING, no matter how useless it is but the more extreme and more visible it is the better, and are therefore assured that their government is hard at work and isn't just asleep at the wheel as they though. Then, after the posturing and signaling is complete, everything goes back to the status quo, and the rich and powerful can keep braking the rules like before while some patsy schmuck got a fine as proof to the voting plebs that the system and enforcement works.
Rinse and repeat for every crisis or scandal that impact the image or elections of our leaders.
Human rights abuses in mining related to battery mining is its own problem to be dealt with on its own terms. This is a good solution to that problem, not a 1% solution or virtue signaling.
Even as the EU ignores human rights abuses in other fields that supply products to the EU? No, I no longer buy that. There is no need to specify electric vehicles in the regulation - it should be general enough to cover all aspects including vehicles, textiles, electronics, telecom equipment, etc. If they want to grandfather in some specific problematic company or component, sure, go ahead and do so. But making this regulation specific to EVs is clearly cover for a different motive.
> Even as the EU ignores human rights abuses in other fields that supply products to the EU?
Pretty much every government ignores human rights abuses in pretty much every field as long as the human rights abuses happen far enough away, no? I would love a huge "no product sold in the EU can have been produced in a way which involves any form of 'human rights abuse'" law, but we know governments well enough to not expect that, right? I don't even know how you'd define "human rights abuses" in a way which prohibits both mistreatment of miners for rare earth minerals and slavery and indentured servitude and underpaid, overworked sweatshop conditions and poorly treated coffee farmers under one definition without being overly broad and hitting unintended fields; coming up with such legislation genuinely sounds like a ton of work with a significant risk of fucking over industries unintentionally.
For the moment, I'll take a trickle of laws which target specific industries rather than nothing. I certainly won't attack legislation which moves us in a good direction for not being the silver bullet "liberate everyone in the world being poorly treated or underpaid" law.
> but we know governments well enough to not expect that, right?
So why target the EV supply chain, then? What made the politicians get up and start enacting laws now, but not start applying their lawmakering skills to other industries as well?
I mean I don't know, but I'd guess either lobbying or because someone thought it'd make their re-election chances better or because someone thought it'd give EU companies a competitive advantage? Or maybe someone is genuinely concerned about human rights and thinks this is realistically the best they can do right now? I honestly don't know or care.
And thanks to you the clothing companies say “why pick on us when you import horrendous batteries”.
The car market is about the same size as the clothing market, your 20:1 ratio is way off. Allowing the car market to become as bad as the clothing is not a win.
There is no need to specify electric vehicles in the regulation - it should be general enough to cover all aspects including vehicles, textiles, electronics, telecom equipment, etc.
>Not doing enough is not an excuse for not doing anything at all, though.
That doesn't answer my question on why the EU turns a blind eye on other industries but suddenly focuses on those with local competition. Doing a good thing in one place doesn't suddenly absolve you of thousands of other poor things you did or not did.
>And clothing is typically less dangerous than EV batteries.
Is breathing in fossil fuel emissions less dangerous? How many Europeans have been killed so far by non-compliant EV batteries?
> That doesn't answer my question on why the EU turns a blind eye on other industries but suddenly focuses on those with local competition.
The answer seems obvious though, there will be more vocal and powerful lobbies in fields with local competition.
> Doing a good thing in one place doesn't suddenly absolve you of thousands of other poor things you did or not did.
I don't think anyone claimed that. But doing a good thing in one place certainly shouldn't be criticised just because in another place nothing is done, which is what you did.
> Is breathing in fossil fuel emissions less dangerous?
I think clothing is less dangerous than both fossil fuel and EV batteries.
Don't think they are turning a blind eye as there is a fair amount of regulation on supply chains in place/upcoming (e.g., CSDDD on EU level, or for example the German Lieferkettengesetz).
There has already been a lot of progress on the front of food supply chains, now on batteries, sometimes I hope it will come for clothing as well, and industry can be competitively brought back to the EU, and the disposable fast fashion madness will end.
you want them to pass regulation without input from the industry? Isn't that what hn usually complains about, that these regulations are made by bureaucrats without knowledge of the industry?
This is just regulatory capture. It is in the large companies interest to have burdensome regulation - they can shoulder the costs (which are often significant), but newcomers and smaller competitors can't.
This is basically pulling up the ladder to prevent startups and protect incumbents, and the EU has been very successful at that. The share of large companies that have been created in the past three decades is very low compared to the US (mostly in IT).
> “We take the information we know about that nickel and we create a digital replica of it,” said Carey. “Where was it mined? What was its geolocation? What was its weight? What was the elapsed time in terms of processing?
“Then all of that information that we gather – at every step along the journey about that same piece of nickel – we can tie to that VIN or that QR code.”
This opens so many possible control and regulation scenarios...
> Carey said that this could influence buying decisions.
And 'soft' discrimination/protectionism scenarios.
Yea the problem with this is tracking basic materials, commodities is HARD. Nickel is about 15k a ton... so a buck a KG to track (not unreasonable) you're adding quite a bit of cost. How about zinc at 2k a ton... that's a huge cost addition.
The reality is that people who think these things up have little context for the complexity, scope and scale of what they are proposing. If they want the information to be accurate and useful then it's going to be expensive. If they want the system to of reasonable cost then it isnt going to do the job...
I had the opportunity to examine a Dacia recently, and I was blown away by the apparent build quality. Just closing the door felt as solid as any German luxury brand if not as heavy. The owner smiled and mentioned, yes, this vehicle is designed to still be functional after driving on Romanian roads.
I'm a bit confused, you one side say there's no cheap car in Europe, then give a price in USD - are you actually in Europe and know what you are talking about? You can get a new Fiat, Citroen or Mitsubishi under 15k (some even hybrids) even here in the high-price-island Switzerland.
Well, that's the same for all documents. You can just make them up, it's not that hard with 5 minutes of photoshop.
But if there is a control and a manufacturer get caught lying about the provenance they are going to have a bad time (or the car manufacturer/battery resellers which didn't do their due diligence).
Yes, but my point is rather the opposite: This allows to enforce various sanctions and controls against, for instance, Chinese manufacturers or specific mining countries, or to steer consumers away from certain producers while claiming that this is not protectionism but only "consumer choice".
For instance, Wikipedia says that Russia is the 3rd largest producer of Nickel in the world (and France is 4th through New Caledonia...). This system, and indeed assuming that data are not falsified, allows them to indirectly hit them.
Once the EU has visibility of so many data I'm sure they'll get creative ;)
The vin is a unique key in a database which contrails the data. Sure you can forge the vin, just like you can today, but that can be discovered and comes with a ton of risk
"To preserve intellectual property, manufacturers will be able to access the full scope of information in a battery passport but other parties will be limited in what they can see."
Why? It's hard to argue without the details, but I think the direction is good.
I want to know more about the products I use. A can of coke should have a QR code with all the information about the product. Which mines provided the Aluminium?
I develop traceability solutions for agri-food, and it's pretty impressive to see how everyone is suddenly actually really researching their supply chains in the run up to new EU deforestation laws requiring this due diligence.
Of course it's possible to debate the effects and impact of the legislation (in some cases companies may choose to bail completely on certain origins, which does little to advance environmental or social issues there), but from what I've seen so far it is acting as a catalyzing force at large organizations to start doing real due diligence efforts.