Concerns have risen in recent years about the accessibility of raw materials considered “critical” for technological advancements. The GeoPolRisk indicator was designed as a midpoint indicator in life cycle sustainability assessment to measure geopolitical supply risk with the aim to incorporate raw material criticality as a complement to environmental life cycle assessment (LCA). A recent review of supply risk methods conducted within the Task Force on mineral resources of the Life Cycle Initiative hosted by UN Environment Programme highlighted the opportunity to extend the methodology to an endpoint level. We address this opportunity by presenting GeoPolEndpoint, an indicator that measures the socio-economic damage of the use of mineral resources linked to the area of protection “Natural Resources” in LCA. We build upon previous efforts by introducing price elasticity considerations and modeling potential effects of supply disruptions on commodity markets in the form of a welfare loss and a loss of consumer surplus. The socio-economic damage occurs as geopolitically driven increased costs for raw materials. We test our method on aluminum, cobalt, nickel, and copper, materials relevant for lithium-ion batteries. Results show that nickel and cobalt dominate the contribution to socio-economic damages because of their price and supply risk; we estimate the impact of the use of the four analyzed materials as a potential increased cost ranging from 0.30 to 1.86 USD/kWh depending on the technology and year. We build the steps to assess how the use of certain raw materials could have a substantial economic impact when developing technologies, possibly identifying the shifting of burden due to certain materials not usually deemed important from an environmental perspective. This article met the requirements for a gold-gold JIE data openness badge described at http://jie.click/badges.

中文翻译：

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生命周期可持续性评估中矿产资源供应风险终点指标设计：以锂离子电池为例

近年来，人们越来越担心被认为对技术进步“至关重要”的原材料的可及性。GeoPolRisk 指标被设计为生命周期可持续性评估的中点指标，用于衡量地缘政治供应风险，旨在将原材料关键性作为环境生命周期评估 (LCA) 的补充。最近在联合国环境规划署主办的生命周期倡议矿产资源工作队内对供应风险方法进行的审查强调了将该方法扩展到端点级别的机会。我们通过介绍 GeoPolEndpoint 来抓住这个机会，这是一个衡量与 LCA 中“自然资源”保护区域相关的矿产资源使用的社会经济损害的指标。我们通过引入价格弹性考虑并模拟供应中断对商品市场的潜在影响，以福利损失和消费者剩余损失的形式在先前的努力的基础上进一步努力。社会经济损害发生在地缘政治驱动的原材料成本增加时。我们在与锂离子电池相关的铝、钴、镍和铜材料上测试我们的方法。结果表明，镍和钴因其价格和供应风险而在社会经济损失中占主导地位；我们估计使用四种分析材料的影响可能会增加 0.30 到 1.86 美元/千瓦时的成本，具体取决于技术和年份。我们制定步骤来评估某些原材料的使用如何在开发技术时产生重大经济影响，可能确定由于某些材料引起的负担转移，从环境角度来看通常不重要。本文满足了http://jie.click/badges 上描述的金-金JIE 数据开放徽章的要求。