Material tracing
Pick a mineral, cobalt, lithium, copper, tin, rare earths, silicon, and follow it from mine to manufacturer. Which countries extract, refine, and consume it, and where the bottlenecks and geopolitical exposure concentrate.
Cobalt from the DRC, lithium from Chile, rare earths from China, assembly in Vietnam, sold everywhere, discarded somewhere else entirely. Nobody can manage a chain they cannot see, so we draw it, from the extraction site through to the orbit where some of it ends up.
These figures are the reason a spreadsheet is the wrong instrument. A supply chain is a graph.
Different questions need different cuts of the same underlying map.
Pick a mineral, cobalt, lithium, copper, tin, rare earths, silicon, and follow it from mine to manufacturer. Which countries extract, refine, and consume it, and where the bottlenecks and geopolitical exposure concentrate.
The full path for a finished product: extraction, refining, component manufacture, assembly, distribution, use, and end-of-life, plotted rather than described.
Where the 62 million tonnes actually goes. Formal recycling, informal processing, transboundary shipment, landfill, with country-level collection rates and treatment capacity.
Profiles for 60 or more countries: what each mines, refines, manufactures, imports, exports, and disposes of, alongside regulatory environment and enforcement record.
It reads as a stretch until you follow the chain. A satellite is electronics: the same minerals, the same tiers, the same suppliers, and an end-of-life nobody has an instrument for. Leaving it out would make the map incomplete in exactly the place where the gap is largest. Satellite operators planning constellation decommissioning are asking the same questions a producer asks about a take-back scheme, with fewer answers available.
Satellite operators planning constellation end-of-life.
Supply chain managers who need geographic risk visibility rather than a supplier list.
Due diligence teams tracking conflict minerals to a named site.
Compliance officers mapping EPR obligations across jurisdictions.
Researchers studying global material flows.
Name a mineral or a product. You get the extraction, refining, and manufacturing geography, plus where concentration and enforcement risk sit.