Supply Chain Diagram: Critical Raw Materials
Trace one critical raw material from extraction to recovery, identify the risks and dependencies along the way, and find practical opportunities to reduce reliance on virgin materials.
Purpose of the template
Critical raw materials sit at the centre of many products and clean technologies, but their supply chains can involve environmental harm, human-rights risks, supply concentration, energy-intensive processing, and difficult end-of-life recovery.
This template helps teams map one material—such as lithium, cobalt, aluminium, graphite, nickel, or rare earth elements—across its full life cycle. It supports more resilient, responsible, and circular decisions across sourcing, product design, use, collection, and recycling.
What is included
The template follows six connected stages:
Inputs & extraction
Processing & refining
Material production
Manufacturing & product design
Use & market demand
Collection, recovery & recycling
Each stage includes guiding questions and prefilled examples of key risks and opportunities, from recycled-content share and mining impacts to traceability, repair, take-back, closed-loop systems, regulation, and industry leadership.
The final stage feeds back into the first: recovered materials can become circular inputs for new products.
How to use it
Start by completing the Business profile and Material profile. Choose one material and one main use case before mapping another material.
Work from Stage 1 to Stage 6. Add sticky notes with findings, evidence, suppliers, countries, unanswered questions, assumptions, risks, and opportunities. Use green markers for opportunities or actions to explore, and orange markers for risks, gaps, dependencies, or requirements.
Finish by reviewing the full chain together. Prioritise the most important risks, agree the best opportunities to reduce virgin-material use, identify evidence still needed, and assign actions, owners, and review dates.
Suggested workshop
Run this as a 90–120 minute cross-functional workshop.
Before the session, select one material and gather any available sourcing, supplier, product, recycled-content, regulatory, and end-of-life information.
Begin by agreeing the scope and completing the two profiles. Then spend around 10–15 minutes on each supply-chain stage, using the prompts to capture evidence, uncertainties, risks, and circularity opportunities. Mark the most important notes as green or orange as you go.
Use the final 15–20 minutes to agree priorities: the most significant supply, environmental, social, regulatory, and circularity risks; the most promising interventions; and the actions the business will take, support, or lead.
Who it is for
Use this template with sustainability, procurement, product design, engineering, operations, supply-chain, compliance, legal, finance, and leadership teams. It is also useful in supplier discussions, material-strategy workshops, circular-design projects, and due-diligence reviews.
A starting point, not a complete list
The template is deliberately prefilled with suggestions, example risks, and possible opportunities to make it easier to begin. These are prompts—not fixed answers or a complete checklist. Change, remove, add to, or adapt every element to reflect your material, product, geography, suppliers, and business priorities.
What you will leave with
A shared map of the material’s supply chain, its highest-priority risks and dependencies, circularity opportunities, key regulations and standards, evidence gaps, and a practical set of actions to reduce impact and build a more resilient material system.
