When the Francis Scott Key Bridge was struck by an errant container ship last March and collapsed into the Patapsco River, many worried—apart from the obviously tragic loss of human life—how this catastrophe might impact supply chains throughout the Mid-Atlantic region and beyond. After all, Baltimore is an important trade hub and one of the country’s 20 largest ports, handling 37 million tons of trade goods annually, including about a quarter of all U.S. automobile imports. (For reference, Houston Port Authority is the largest, handling more than seven times that tonnage.) The partial bridge collapse blocked the shipping channel and put a stop to almost all incoming and outgoing cargo from the Port of Baltimore.

Fortunately, the event had relatively little impact on building materials supply chains. According to Ken Simonson, chief economist at Associated General Contractors of America, supplier associations reported no issues to his organization, and further commented in early April that “all [building] materials and equipment imported through Baltimore is either adequately supplied at the moment or will arrive via alternative ports.” But then, supply chain health is informed by several factors, operable shipping ports being just one of them.

A perverse coincidence

Mere hours after the bridge collapse in the early morning of March 26, Grace Farms Foundation held its third Design for Freedom Summit, an annual gathering of professionals and leaders principally in the design, construction, and manufacturing fields who are working to eliminate forced labor from the building materials supply chain. (I was in attendance, reporting on the event for a different publication.)

There are numerous building and composite materials that are classified as high-risk for being tied to forced labor: brick, timber, iron, copper, glass, rubber, and fiber and textiles being among the list. “The construction sector is the single highest contributor to climate change, with the highest embodied carbon, and is also the industrial sector with the highest embodied suffering,” writes Grace Farms CEO Sharon Prince in The Regenerative Materials Movement.

We have indeed entered a new era of material transparency, wherein healthy supply chains are defined by more than the sustainable attributes of the physical products in question but also by the ethical and humane practices (or lack thereof) that feed those materials to begin with. And while it should go without saying that slavery is illegal in every corner of the globe, so-called modern slavery, which assumes the form of forced labor and human trafficking, remains a very real and very big problem, and is something that actively contributes to building materials supply chains around the world.

Governments take action

Recently, a majority of governments in the European Union approved new legislation that will require large companies based and/or operating in the EU (with net turnover in excess of €450 million and >1000 employees) to audit their supply chains to identify any issues tied to forced labor and environmental degradation. On May 24, the EU Council formally approved the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), which will be gradually phased in over the next 3-5 years. Similar examples include the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, France’s Corporate Duty of Vigilance Law, and the UK’s Modern Slavery Act of 2015.

In the U.S., both U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security have taken decisive steps to prevent forced labor from contributing to domestic commerce, most notably in the form of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which takes aim at China’s Xinjiang Region, where an abundance of building materials, minerals, garments, components for renewable energy and solar power equipment, and much more are extracted and produced under inhumane labor conditions. The DHS also operates the interagency U.S. Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force, whose purpose is to track and prevent the importation of assembled parts and raw materials that are sourced from regions that use forced and/or child labor.

Codifying consumption

This kind of legislation and regulative oversight not only fosters greater trust among customers but, on a broader scale, it enables companies within large and complex supply chains to know who their partners are doing business with, and so on and so forth down the line. It is an attempt to codify what Nasreen Sheikh, a human rights advocate, public speaker, and survivor of modern slavery calls “conscious consumption.” (Sheikh delivered the Summit’s closing keynote.) It also gets around the fiduciary risk that many companies take when opting to forego ethics in place of what Sharon Prince calls “the slavery discount.”

“The issue of complicity is a real challenge,” says Jared Gilbert, an associate partner and director of communications with COOKFOX Architects. Gilbert is a member of Grace Farms’ Design for Freedom working group and he sat on the breakout panel “Supply Chain Mapping Technology” at the summit last March. “We have choices we can make every day that can make a difference, and it’s a difference that is a responsibility we have by virtue of our privilege. Denying our complicity or deciding it’s too complex to address or that the problem belongs to policy makers or big corporations is not an appropriate response.”

Mapping corporate sustainability

At a very high level, ethical materials, quality, and fair labor assurances can be obtained to varying degrees in the form of Declare labels, EPDs, Cradle to Cradle certification, FSC Chain of Custody certification, and dozens more standards, labels, and initiatives that are designed to create ethical construction material supply chains. But as Grace Farms leadership states in its own Design for Freedom Toolkit, “we acknowledge that we cannot ‘certify’ our way out of the problem.”

Winning hearts and minds is likewise a big challenge, and one made arguably more achievable by pressuring markets to revise their practices versus guilting consumers into making different—and often costlier—choices. Gilbert likens the problem to recycling saying, “We’re all told that if we just recycle it will solve the [waste] problem, when in fact what needs to happen is manufacturers need to stop producing so much garbage.”

He continues: “We need to be learning enough to shape our supply chains such that they’re not harboring forced labor. Slavery is a technology, just like supply chain mapping is a technology.”

Supply chains and ESG

On a more basic level, for companies in the supply chain to ensure they are not breaking any laws, there is supply chain mapping. Sourcemap provides businesses with clear audits of their N-tier (aka multi-tier architecture) supply chains. The company’s founder and CEO Leonardo Bonanni, who participated in two panels at the Design for Freedom Summit, including “Supply Chain Mapping Technology,” defines Sourcemap’s mission as “raising standards at every step of global trade” and “enabling companies to identify everyone they do business with.” He calls this scale of mapping the “foundation” for ensuring multi-national companies meet their ESG goals.

AI and machine learning play a role in Sourcemap’s ability to trace materials throughout supply chains and help identify potential links to geographic hot spots where forced labor conditions are prevalent. And yet, Bonanni frames his business as a more analog technology. “We use the term ‘supply chain mapping’ to make the process seem more technical, but it’s actually a human process of not just of knowing where things come from, but being in contact with the people who make them; it’s a process of building out a social network of suppliers. Supply chain mapping doesn’t happen automatically. It doesn’t happen through AI or some sort of remote sensing technology. It happens because companies require their suppliers to make themselves known and to divulge the names of their suppliers.”

Bonanni concedes AI’s important place in the larger equation. “Globalization was invented long before the internet,” he says. Now that the latter has caught up with the former, it is feasible—and even reasonable—to require companies to be in contact with thousands of other companies and, with the aid of more advanced AI models, collect the necessary data. “That’s where the verification comes in.”

Rooting out embodied suffering

Supply chain mapping is nothing new, and in fact has become common practice across various industries. Glass, steel, leather, and cotton, to cite a few examples, are all extensively mapped by heavy manufacturing trades, the automotive industry, and the footwear and apparel industries. (A lot slips through the cracks, as evidenced by the tens of millions of people—mostly women and children—who endure forced labor conditions and worse to this day.)

The main obstacle for the building industry, in Bonanni’s estimation, concerns the protocols by which most builders operate. “Architects, builders, developers, and even large construction companies have a rough time mapping” because their supply chains tend to change for each project, he says. The exact makeup of multi-tiered supply chains “almost never repeats” and, therefore, “it’s very hard to build relationships … collect real-time data and verify conditions.”

Everything from government legislation to transparency standards are doing their part to weed out embodied suffering from supply chains, one tier and one supplier at a time. And clearly, the technologies and tools at our disposal have made global players faster, better, and more efficient. Accountability and culpability, on the other hand, are not things that can be measured with an algorithm.

“It takes time to implement these business processes inside a company,” Bonanni says. “And for people around the world, mapping would be good to start now. Because it’s only a matter of time before other economies also require transparency.”

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