The Consolidated Mining Standard Initiative: The mining industry’s latest attempt to self-regulate and greenwash, an inherent conflict of interest with public good
By Chelsea Hodgkins
Recently, Public Citizen joined 25 global community organizations, labor unions, and Indigenous, environmental and human rights groups to raise concerns about the Consolidated Mining Standard Initiative—the mining industry’s latest attempt to self-regulate and greenwash its horrendous track record of human rights abuses and environmental destruction.
Why focus on the mining industry?
As decarbonization and electrification progress, our global economy is transitioning from one reliant on fossil fuels to one reliant on minerals, expanding the role of the mining industry.
In addition to their other applications, minerals are the foundation of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries, and other energy transition technologies.
Therefore, the extent to which the mining industry’s social and environmental performance aligns with the public interest is not only growing in importance, but matters to our future collective welfare.
What do you mean by industry self-regulation?
Voluntary standards and certifications, or ‘schemes,’ play an active role in governing the mining sector. These schemes create a standard—each with different assessment criteria—that companies can opt to be evaluated and audited against.
Some schemes offer certification, indicating that a company has met a designated level of compliance with the standard, not necessarily that they are performing at a high level of social responsibility and environmental sustainability. Often, but not always, schemes are entirely industry-led and governed.
How are voluntary standards used?
Mining companies often join voluntary standard and certification initiatives to signal a certain level of social and environmental performance to regulators and their downstream users, like automotive companies.
Automakers use voluntary schemes to fulfill responsible sourcing requirements and reduce supply chain emissions. In fact, 78% of automakers evaluated by Lead the Charge in the annual Leaderboard use voluntary certification schemes for these means.
Increasingly, policymakers are relying on voluntary schemes for compliance with mandatory laws and regulations. For instance, in the European Union, the Critical Raw Materials Act and the new battery regulation both recognize voluntary standards and certifications for due diligence requirements.
For years, civil society groups have questioned the credibility of voluntary schemes — with good reason. Evaluations, including those from Germanwatch and Mercedes-Benz, demonstrate that common problems include a lack of transparency, inadequate oversight and accountability, the exclusion of affected communities and workers in the assessment process and overall governance of the schemes, and large divergences in quality based on what they actually evaluate.
Voluntary schemes cannot be a sole tool for automakers, policy makers, or investors to understand the social and environmental risks at a project site based on company behavior. At most, strong schemes can provide a useful data point that, when compared with other sources of information, including community reporting and engagement, can help inform decisions.
What is the Consolidated Mining Standard Initiative?
In 2023, four industry-led voluntary standard and certification initiatives —Copper Mark, the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), Mining Association of Canada’s Towards Sustainable Mining (MAC TSM), and the World Gold Council—launched the Consolidated Mining Standard Initiative (CMSI) to combine their separate voluntary mining standards into one ‘global’ standard.
This global standard is not being co-created with meaningful participation from impacted stakeholders. Rather, it merges existing weak standards developed by industry that have been criticized as being tools for greenwashing.
Various evaluations, including those by Lead the Charge, show these standards lack rigor, transparency, oversight, and quality.
For instance, ICMM founding member and mining company, Rio Tinto, which with major automakers including Ford and BMW have aluminum, lithium, and copper agreements, has a long history of allegations of human rights violations at its operations globally. Since 2022, villagers in Madagascar have raised more than 8,000 complaints regarding water pollution and subsequent hardships caused by multiple dam failures at the QMM Mine. These communities continue seeking compensation and other remedies from Rio Tinto for the losses of their lands and livelihoods.
Consolidation, then, isn’t progress if it merely combines low standards that rubber-stamp business as usual, rather than driving continuous improvement that produces better outcomes for frontline communities and workers.
Concerningly, the joining of these four schemes unifies the power, influence, and interests of large swathes of the mining industry and their associations to delay a much needed race to the top in the sector.
The International Council on Mining and Metals alone has a stunning footprint: It represents one-third of the global metals and mining industry, which has reported total adjusted profits of US$888.8 billion since 2013. The Mining Association of Canada’s TSM accounts for the majority of Canada’s mining industry; Copper Mark’s partners are some of the largest global corporations, including Amazon, Google, and Ford; and the World Gold Council represents gold mining companies operating in over 45 countries.
People and the environment suffer when companies are allowed to self-regulate with weak voluntary standards.
How the Consolidated Standard develops will either help drive a much needed race to the top by companies fueling vehicle electrification and the broader energy transition or will be a tool to further industry greenwashing and quicken the race to the bottom.
Industries can’t regulate themselves, especially when there is an inherent conflict of interest between their pocketbooks and what’s good for the public.