Rare Earth and Critical Minerals Editing and Proofreading Services

A battery manufacturer's supply chain disclosure states that its cobalt is "responsibly sourced in accordance with industry standards." Behind that sentence is a supply chain where the mine of origin is known and audited for the first tier of the chain, becomes a mixed batch at a regional trader with no per-source tracking, and arrives at a smelter that blends material from a dozen countries before it reaches the manufacturer. The claim is not false exactly. It describes an aspiration applied across a chain where, for a meaningful portion of the material, nobody can actually trace it back to a specific mine at all.

We edit what mining, trading and processing companies produce to disclose the origin and chain of custody of critical minerals — supply chain traceability and sourcing disclosures, smelter and refiner due diligence documentation, chain-of-custody and mass balance reporting, conflict mineral and responsible sourcing statements, and the correspondence responding to a customer or regulator asking what "responsibly sourced" actually means for a specific shipment. Our editors work on the claim that has to describe a supply chain, not just assert a standard was followed.

The traceable versus untraceable distinction is what a sourcing disclosure actually needs to state, and its failure is a claim of responsible sourcing applied uniformly to a chain where traceability genuinely varies by segment. Responsibly sourced in accordance with industry standards describes an intention that may be entirely genuine for part of the supply chain and simply inapplicable, because untraceable, for another part of the same shipment. We work through these so the actual traceability method is stated — verified mine-to-smelter chain of custody, mass balance allocation, or industry-average sourcing with no specific chain of custody — rather than a single claim covering material that was actually sourced through different methods, since these carry very different meaning and a reader needs to know which applies to the material they are actually receiving; so any point in the chain where material from multiple sources is blended is disclosed specifically, given that a mass balance system allocates a sourcing claim across a blended batch rather than tracing every unit, and a reader needs to know this is how the claim works rather than assuming physical traceability; so due diligence findings are reported with what was actually verified and by whom, because an audit of the first-tier supplier and a verified chain through to the mine of origin are different depths of assurance; so any portion of a supply chain that could not be traced is disclosed as untraceable rather than folded silently into an aggregate responsible-sourcing claim, given that this is precisely the gap a customer or regulator asking a specific question is trying to find; so smelter and refiner-level due diligence is referenced by the specific programme or standard applied, rather than a general assertion of compliance; and so a customer's specific question about a specific shipment receives an answer about that shipment, not a repetition of the company's general sourcing policy. Disclosures written this way describe what the supply chain actually is, not what it aspires to be.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including supply chain data, sourcing records and customer correspondence. We are editors rather than supply chain auditors, compliance specialists or mineral traders, and we offer no view on sourcing practices, traceability findings or compliance determinations. What we can do is make sure the claim matches what was actually verified.