Leveraging Conflict Minerals Compliance Programs for Broader ESG Initiatives

Topic Overview

Businesses worldwide have collected data via Conflict Minerals reporting templates (CMRTs) for several years. Most collect the data to file with the SEC or to submit the completed CMRT to a customer and then repeat the following year. But you can do so much more!

Join Source Intelligence's Dr. Jennifer Kraus and industry expert Lawrence Heim, Editor at PracticalESG.com as they explore how to leverage the Conflict Minerals compliance programs, the data collection process, and the data itself for purposes beyond Section 1502 & Regulation (EU) 2017/821 compliance, and meeting customer requirements.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this learning event, participants will be able to:

• List drivers for Conflict Minerals compliance
• Identify regulatory frameworks driving supply chain ESG data needs
• Describe ways to leverage Conflict Minerals compliance activities for broader ESG initiatives 

Watch the webinar or download the slides:

About Source Intelligence Webinars

Our webinars are designed in collaboration with carefully selected topic experts to provide valuable and actionable information to supply chain leaders. 

Each of our webinars seeks to understand pertinent supply chain issues from all angles and provide guidelines and best practices on how to best approach them.

About Our Experts

Dr. Jennifer Kraus

Chief Scientific Officer, Source Intelligence

Dr. Jennifer Kraus has over 30 years of experience providing environmental, health, and safety services to customers around the world. Prior to co-founding Source Intelligence®, Dr. Kraus was President of Global Environmental Consulting Company, Inc. (GECCo, Inc.). Dr. Kraus also served as an associate with Dames & Moore, environmental manager for General Dynamics Electronics Division.

Lawrence Heim

Editor, PracticalESG.com

Lawrence Heim has been practicing in the field of ESG management for more than 35 years. He began his career as a legal assistant in the Environmental Practice of Vinson & Elkins working for a partner who is nationally recognized and an adjunct professor of environmental law at the University of Texas Law School. He moved into technical environmental consulting with ENSR Consulting & Engineering at the height of regulatory development, working across a range of disciplines. He was one of the firm’s leading environmental compliance and management systems auditors and helped create the company’s first national practice for environmental auditing. Among his professional highlights during this time was developing an innovative regulatory strategy that saved a major petroleum refinery $150 million in waste management costs associated with a new waste listing.

Lawrence became an in-house environmental audit manager with Georgia-Pacific, then a publicly traded Fortune 150 manufacturer. At Georgia-Pacific, he designed and implemented a comprehensive redesign of the company’s internal environmental audit and corrective action program which was later approved without modification by EPA and the Department of Justice as part of a $120 million Clean Air Act settlement. He was also one of the company’s primary experts on waste management regulations. It was during this time he was granted a charter Certified Professional Environmental Auditor (CPEA) designation from the Board of Environmental Auditor Certifications during their inaugural year.

Lawrence joined Marsh USA and helped create the Global Environmental Risk Consulting Practice, shifting his focus from compliance to a broader vision of environmental impacts to business and risk management, working with clients to reduce their environmental risk profile by adapting traditional risk management processes and tools. At the same time, he continued to provide regulatory compliance support to clients and was Marsh USA’s primary environmental regulatory expert nationally.

As a partner at Elm Consulting Group, he continued providing international clients support on environmental, health, and safety compliance and management systems. He founded the subsidiary Elm Sustainability Partners and became an internationally recognized expert in conflict minerals, responsible minerals supply chain due diligence, and associated audit programs/practices. He was the only non-financial auditor selected by the US Securities and Exchange Commission to participate as an expert panelist on the conflict minerals rule and provided guidance on non-financial auditing to US Departments of State and Commerce. Lawrence remains one of only a handful of auditors to have conducted Independent Private Sector Audits (IPSAs) of Conflict Minerals Reports submitted to the SEC under Dodd-Frank Section 1502. While at Elm, he was voted to the Board of the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) Environmental, Safety, and Health Audit Center.

During his time at the Responsible Business Alliance/Responsible Minerals Initiative, he led an unprecedented period of due diligence standards development, including spearheading an expansion into ESG standards for responsible mineral supply chains.

Lawrence is the author of Killing Sustainability (2018) and is a Board Member of ASSET, the anti-slavery organization founded by award-winning actress and former UN Goodwill Ambassador Julia Ormond.