The Global Battery Alliance (GBA) Battery Passport initiative sits squarely within this evolution. Founded in 2017, the GBA is the world’s largest multi-stakeholder partnership to scale a sustainable, circular and responsible battery value chain by facilitating collective action across the value chain. The Alliance convenes over 150 members including the world’s largest mining, cell manufacturing, battery users and recycling companies, with international organisations, labour unions, NGOs and academia.
The GBA’s flagship initiative, the Battery Passport, is an emerging global sustainability reporting and certification scheme for batteries, underpinned by indicators that allow data on facility-level sustainability performance in the battery supply chain to be gathered, verified, scored, aggregated and compared. It is built on innovative Digital Product Passport protocols and technologies, to enable trusted and harmonized supply chain data to be harnessed effectively.
It represents a shift from fragmented transparency efforts toward harmonized, decision-ready sustainability infrastructure for batteries, beginning with EVs, but increasingly relevant across energy storage, consumer electronics, data centres, and other battery-dependent sectors.
The Challenge: Creating Incentives
The introduction of the EU Batteries Regulation (EUBR) marks a turning point for battery value chains. Mandatory carbon footprinting, due diligence, recycled content disclosure, and digital product passports are reshaping market expectations for the battery supply chain and beyond, creating robust incentives for transparency, decarbonization, circularity, responsible sourcing, and improved traceability across global supply chains. While compliance with the EUBR provides a powerful foundation for transformation, the next step is ensuring that this regulatory baseline catalyzes even broader and deeper improvements in sustainability performance across battery value chains.
Today’s landscape is characterized by multiple overlapping standards and reporting frameworks, albeit with limited comparability of sustainability performance, and increasing traceability requirements focused on security of supply. In this context, there is a risk that due diligence, if implemented narrowly, could function primarily as re-risking and gatekeeping mechanism rather than as a tool for continuous improvement, supplier engagement, and capacity-building with the segments of the value chain at greatest need for capacity building and engagement. This includes small and medium sized enterprises for example.
While regulatory “sticks” are necessary, they are insufficient. Responsible sourcing must also become a competitive advantage.
The GBA Approach – from compliance to market differentiation
The GBA Battery Passport is designed not only to support and streamline compliance with the EU Batteries Regulation, but also to translate compliance into genuine market differentiation and competitive advantage. At its core are the Battery Benchmarks, a globally aligned set of sustainability performance indicators covering carbon footprint, responsible sourcing, circularity, and broader ESG criteria developed through multi-stakeholder consensus. The Benchmarks are designed to:
- Align with the EU Batteries Regulation and OECD due diligence guidance
- Build on and recognize credible voluntary and national standards
- Allow nuance between standards
- Enable structured, comparable reporting across the value chain
Traceability is a foundational element but not the end goal. Traceability must enable accountability and recognition. The missing ingredient in many systems today is comparability. Investors and procurers need decision-ready data that allows them to differentiate between products and suppliers when making capital allocation decisions, sourcing contracts, preferred supplier designations, and product-level sustainability claims. Without comparability, transparency cannot translate into market incentives.
The GBA Battery Passport sustainability certification scheme is currently in the operational trials phase. It integrates standardized reporting via the Benchmarks, harmonized GHG accounting rules, a Conformity Assessment Scheme to underpin third-party assurance. It also facilitates the development of enabling digital infrastructure (developed in partnership with the International Trade Centre) for secure and interoperable data exchange.
For example, one of the Battery Benchmarks, the Greenhouse Gas rulebook, focuses on carbon intensity at the battery level, requiring standardized calculation methodologies aligned with emerging regulatory requirements. Harmonized GHG accounting rules ensure that emissions from mining, refining, cell production, and assembly are calculated consistently across geographies and actors, enabling credible comparison between batteries produced in different contexts.
Other Benchmarks assess responsible sourcing practices aligned with OECD guidance, including risk identification, mitigation measures, and third-party verification. Together, these elements make sustainability performance measurable, comparable, and actionable.
From the Coalition of the Willing to an Alliance of the Doing
In January 2026, the GBA launched Operational Trials involving 16 industry consortia spanning mining, refining, cell manufacturing, and automotive production and utility scale stationary storage. These pilots are testing:
- The participating organisation’s readiness for the EU Batteries Regulation compliance
- Real-world application of the Battery Benchmarks. In practice, this means that participating consortia are mapping real battery value chains—from mineral extraction through to vehicle or stationary storage integration—submitting standardized data against the Benchmarks, testing digital data exchange systems, and undergoing trial assurance processes. This hands-on approach allows companies to identify data gaps, improve internal systems, and prepare for regulatory implementation while simultaneously shaping the future certification framework in a pre-competitive environment.
- Digital reporting and interoperability solutions that enable secure data exchange between upstream and downstream actors, reducing duplication, improving efficiency, and strengthening traceability. Especially for smaller enterprises, the cost of implementation of digital product passport schemes can be a challenge. By developing data exchange infrastructure built on the UN Transparency Protocol, the technological entry barrier to participation is lowered. Together, these mechanisms ensure inclusivity and help translate sustainability commitments into verified performance improvements across the supply chain.
- Assurance and conformity assessment mechanisms: The framework integrates standardized reporting via the Benchmarks, harmonized GHG accounting rules, and a Conformity Assessment Scheme to underpin third-party assurance. The Conformity Assessment Scheme establishes clear verification requirements and auditor guidance, ensuring that sustainability claims are independently assessed and credible.
- Pathways toward a prototype sustainability certification to provide actionable information related to a battery’s sustainability performance to end users
The breadth of participation demonstrates strong market buy-in. Cell manufacturers, supported by automakers have been central drivers of this momentum, reflecting the way EV supply chains are catalyzing broader supply chain improvements. In many cases, battery mineral mapping and decarbonization
