It was great to see ResponsibleGlass and the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA) announce that they will be working together to address sustainability issues in the glass value chain.
This was almost the first public announcement ResponsibleGlass has made. It raises two questions: firstly, why is it so important for ResponsibleGlass to work with a mining programme? And secondly, given that there are a number of ‘responsible mining standards’ out there, why choose IRMA?
The first question is pretty straightforward to answer. Glass – unless it is recycled – is made largely from mined materials. Silica sand, soda ash, limestone and dolomite are the largest by volume, but there’s a long list of additional materials that are important for particular kinds of glass or for glassmaking processes, from alumina through to zircon and zinc.
For sure, ResponsibleGlass could develop its own standards for mining these raw materials responsibly. That would, frankly, be stupid. It is obviously more sensible to become a market driver for the greater uptake of responsible mining standards that already exist, if they are effective, than to attempt to reinvent a particularly difficult wheel; or alternatively, a slight nuance, to work with such programmes to adapt their existing standards to the extraction of materials they are not yet being applied to.
Ok, then – so why IRMA?
It’s worth noting that the IRMA-ResponsibleGlass collaboration is not exclusive. They will be looking to work together with other programmes that bring additional expertise to the table: for example, on the application of standards to the particular circumstances of sand extraction, and to make sure they are suited to the scale of the businesses involved.
But still, why IRMA? There are many reasons, of course. I would probably emphasise three. Firstly, the IRMA programme is widely recognised in the mining sector, as well as by the end users of mined materials, and by civil society organisations, as being the most comprehensive in its approach to sustainability issues. That does not mean that every supplier of mined materials for glassmaking would be expected to meet the IRMA 100% level from day 1 – it will be a journey, and it will take time – but if you’re setting out on a journey it is useful to have a clear idea of where you want to go.
The second reason is that IRMA, like ResponsibleGlass, is a multi-stakeholder programme. Multi-stakeholder programmes start by asking who you need to have in a room to address a shared challenge. If the challenge is ‘how to mine materials responsibly’ then obviously you need miners in the room – but you also need people affected by the impacts of mining, and the people that make products out of mined materials and sell them to consumers. And that’s a very different starting point than saying ‘we are a mining company, what do we deem to be ‘responsible’’.
And that leads on to a third consideration. Glass is used for thousands of products: glass windows on buildings; glass windscreens on cars; glass screens on mobile phones and computers; glass for solar panels; glass fibre in the blades of wind turbines. And it is often used together with components made from other mined materials: steel, aluminium, nickel, chromium, copper, cobalt, lithium, zinc…. Manufacturers and end users trying to source materials responsibly are right to ask, if all these materials are mined, shouldn’t they be mined in accordance with equivalent standards of responsibility? And the manufacturers and end users who are most serious about responsible sourcing often look to IRMA to set that bar.
It is early days for ResponsibleGlass. It remains to be seen how its standards will address the sourcing of mined materials, and how that will interact with the need to make more use of cullet – recovered and recycled glass.
The hope must be that it will be able to make manufacturers and end users a simple offer: ‘You already have policies for the responsible sourcing of metals. We can help you apply the same principles to your sourcing of glass.’
If you are a car maker, an architectural supplier or a renewable energy producer, that should be one less problem to worry about.