CSyARES- A Circular System for Assessing Rare Earth Sustainability
Nabeel Mancheri, Secretary General, REIA-The Global Rare Earth Industry Association
Rare earth elements (REE) are essential for the transition towards sustainability and are a critical component of many high tech and green technologies such as energy efficient lights, wind turbines, hybrid and full electric vehicles. CSyARES is an industrial initiative. It cooperates closely with upstream and downstream organizations to increase environmental, economic and social standards along the entire supply chain of raw magnets and its downstream applications. CSyARES creates a standardized sustainability certification for rare earth elements (REE), focusing on a "Product Environmental Footprint". The project integrates REIA’s sustainability standards for REEs with a patented traceability technology and LCA based sustainability metrics. The integrated solution provides affordable confidentiality-preserving certification to suppliers, proving their sustainability requirements. The project develops smartly designed, collaborative software to provide cost effective, sustainable, long-term competitive supply security. The system provides certified transparency about the origin of materials, production processes, sustainability and material properties along the rare earth supply chain through a scaled blockchain application.
Nabeel Mancheri is the Secretary General of REIA-The Global Rare Earth Industry Association. He has more than 10 years of experience in the rare earth sector and was instrumental in establishing REIA, the only global association representing the REE industry across the value chain. Previously, he was a senior researcher and project manager at the Department of Material Engineering, KU Leuven, Belgium. Before joining KU Leuven , he was a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML), Leiden University, Netherlands. He also worked as a Research Fellow at The University of Tokyo before moving to Europe. He also held visiting research positions in reputed universities in Australia, Japan, China and USA.