The Green Transition in Context—Cobalt Responsible Sourcing for Battery Manufacturing
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Responsible cobalt in the context of the green transition is a major issue on the global sustainability agenda. Spurred by concerns around child labor in artisanal mine sites in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), corporate actors adopted a myriad of strategies to tackle reputational risks and establish responsible sourcing programs. Now encompassing forced labor, corruption, and environmental degradation mining-specific, as well as community development projects constitute the core of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices in the DRC. Informed by a review of academic and industry studies, this article raises concerns regarding the limitations of responsible cobalt sourcing. We present the initiatives developed to date, based on voluntary strategies, and then introduce new technology tools developed to trace mineral in supply chains, ensuring transparency of the information on the conditions of extraction and trade. Finally, we identify five limitations to responsible cobalt sourcing strategies constituting avenues for future research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it