Mineral raw materials are in every part of our daily lives, and some of them are crucial for the correct development of society. Thus, the concept of critical raw materials (CRM) considers the supply risk and economic importance for an industrial ecosystem’s functioning and its goals in the mid- and long-term (Graedel et al. 2012; Ziemann et al. 2013). For instance, the current global trend toward a green energy transition requires a higher intensity of certain elements (Pommeret et al. 2022), particularly for electrical and battery systems for transportation (Riva Sanseverino and Luu 2022), while the capabilities of recycling or some regional agendas can also have an important relevance in that regard (Černý et al. 2021). Besides, secondary raw materials still require a long path to achieve a dominant fraction of the inputs (Bailey et al. 2008). In addition, the projection of the global population will also influence the demand for raw materials (van Dijk et al. 2021), with an outlook of around a 90% increase in raw material demands up to 2060 (World Bank Group 2017).

Specific CRM analysis has been done in countries like the US, Japan, and China, as well as in supranational organizations like the European Union (EU), with the idea of securing the supply chain of resources, either internally or through partnerships with other countries, based on their regional possibilities to secure the provision of each specific element or mineral (Blengini et al. 2017; USGS 2018; DeWit 2021). However, the approach to analyzing when a certain mineral is critical follows the same idea: a combination of economic importance and supply risk, ordered by a numeric scale, based on the combination of both variables. The analysis is usually done every few years to update the framework, as the type of product demanded by society changes over time (Buijs et al. 2012).

Hence, based on the situation previously described, it is crucial to obtain the raw materials through mining and recycling. Even though recycling techniques have been improved over the last decades (UNEP 2013), it is not possible to provide enough quantity because of the following: the lack of circularity of the whole materials (Bailey et al. 2008), difficulties in the recovery process (Bailey et al. 2008), and a gap caused by economy context differences in terms of raw materials associated (Amighini et al. 2023). Having materials available to recycle from several years or decades ago, when the mix of raw material demand was different from the moment of recycling (UNEP 2013), all these important facts imply that open pit and underground mining are currently required to a large extent, as well as in mid- and long-term scenarios.

Despite the need for raw material sources to meet regional and global demand, there is increasing pressure to not open new mining projects and close ongoing mines. In this regard, the social license to operate (SLO) is becoming a must to be accepted by the influenced area and local and regional stakeholders, where the mine is going to be established (Eerola 2022). SLO tries to address the community–company relationship, requiring a particular approach depending on the region (Lesser et al. 2021).

The impacts generated by mining have been long studied and proven, varying from environmental to social to political (Franks et al. 2014; Sairinen et al. 2017; Owen et al. 2022). Besides, it is a matter of fact that mines will continue to have a certain impact, despite the efforts made by the mining companies and the regulations applied due to the intrinsic characteristics of the activity (Warhate et al. 2006; Werner et al. 2019), making it necessary to achieve a source of the raw materials as responsible as possible (Di Noi et al. 2020). In this regard, several strategies have been proposed for the reclamation and post-closure of mining operations to achieve more sustainable activities (Samadi et al. 2023; Krzyszowska Waitkus 2022). Including important environmental and social factors such as the management of tailings and waste dumps generated during the extraction phase (Bakhtavar et al. 2023) or acid mine drainage (Faybishenko et al. 2023). Post-closure solutions are crucial to increase the value of a mining project (Bakhtavar et al. 2019), from a holistic point of view, requiring its inclusion from the initial mine concept.

Therefore, a methodology is required to assess the mining projects, based on objective parameters such as the technical characteristics of the projects, the type of raw material extracted, and social and environmental conditions. Here is where corporate social responsibility (CSR) assessments can play an important role (Jenkins and Yakovleva 2006; Hilson 2012), providing a qualitative and quantitative analysis by mining project. However, while qualitative CSR analysis has been extensively studied, quantitative approaches are quite rare (Bascompta et al. 2022), with mainly general quantitative analysis for the whole firm (Trumpp and Guenther 2017) or environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) indexes such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI) (Fowler and Hope 2007; Lee and Faff 2009). In this regard, some standards developed by well-known organizations, like the Responsible Mining Foundation (RMF) or the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), are not applicable from a quantitative point of view at the mine-site level (Bascompta et al. 2022). In addition, CSR analysis, or any other index from the sector, does not discriminate by the type of resource extracted, even though society is an important stakeholder and certain resources can play a fundamental role in the society’s goals previously mentioned. This concept is in the same vein as climate stakeholders, clean energy stakeholders, and mining stakeholders as defined by the World Bank. Therefore, these implications should be included in any quantitative CSR analysis.

The study aims to define a quantitative CSR system that considers some corrective factors relevant to society, such as energy transition, recycling availability, or regional conditions. The index, with its corrective factors, is prepared to be applied to mine-site projects at any stage.

A quantitative index for corporate social responsibility has been developed based on the approach from Bascompta et al. (2022), henceforth called CSR basic index. It is an index to analyze corporate social responsibility at the mine-site level and any stage of the project. It consists of two dimensions focused on the technical features, socioeconomic (S) and environmental (E), with 30 elements that allow studying the potential negative and positive impacts of the specific mining activity (11 and 19 elements, respectively), being able to make the analysis using an overall value, including all the elements, or by dimension. Besides, it gives the flexibility to add new elements or dimensions if needed due to some specific project characteristics or new elements found to be relevant.

There are 20 positive elements and 10 negative elements, adding or subtracting value to the basic CSR index. Each element is assessed on a Likert scale of 1–5. The scale of the global CSR basic index is established by a 100-point scale, where a value between 80 and 100 points is considered as a good corporate social responsibility performance, 60–79 satisfactory, 40–59 weak, 20–39 poor, and less than 20 points means a very poor performance. Figure 1 defines the structure and procedure of the index, while Table 1 gathers all the elements included in its determination, sorted by each dimension.

Structure of the CSR basic index where the correction is applied

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On the other hand, elements such as child labor, health and safety, or the conservation of World Heritage elements, among any other compulsory items, remain outside the scope of the index proposed in this study. General elements such as political and legal components are also excluded from the proposed methodology.

The goal of the approach proposed is to set up a procedure that drives continuous improvement of CSR matters at a mine-site or mining project. The particular analysis of each element is explained by Bascompta et al. (2022). However, it is necessary to include some corrective factors to better define the implications of each particular mining project toward society.

The influence of the corrective factors on the quantitative CSR analysis of a mine-site project or a company is complex to determine and still unsolved. However, it is obvious that the obtaining of some minerals or elements plays a key role in a more sustainable society, and, therefore, the development of a particular project can positively affect the society as a whole, either at a local, regional, national, or global level, as well as at the environmental aspect. Therefore, it is necessary to include and balance all the positive and negative socioeconomic and environmental contributions of mining (Samadi et al. 2023).

The correction factors have been based on: (a) the demand–supply risk of the raw material; (b) environmental and climate implications in terms of the need for the raw material; and (c) recycling capability.

In the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) analysis, there is currently no established reference for correction factors. Consequently, to prevent the overestimation of the impact of correction factors on the analysis, a cautious approach has been adopted, capping the maximum influence of correction factors to 10% on the derived results. Any higher impact is deemed too significant, potentially compromising the initial CSR analysis, such as the CSR basic index explained in Sect. 2. Conversely, when a factor analyzed has no discernible impact, it is assigned a value of 1, which allows for a focus on the broader and more general elements of CSR. While there is a need for further research and standardization in this area, this approach offers a practical solution for the current limitations in CSR quantitative analysis.

3.1 Green Transition

One of the main megatrends related to raw materials is the transformation toward a more sustainable and greener economy, shifting from a fossil fuel economy to a clean energy model (Bogdanov et al. 2021; Pörtner et al. 2022). Thus, the production of raw materials such as graphite, cobalt, or lithium must increase around five times to meet the projected demand for energy production and storage, under the scenario of less than 2 °C temperature increase (Hund et al. 2020), as well as many other critical raw materials (World Bank Group 2017; Luderer et al. 2019). The associated increase in mineral demand and, therefore, the need for new mines and expansion of the current ones, will require adequate management of the impacts from a holistic and sustainable perspective (Kügerl et al. 2023). In that sense, corporate social responsibility analysis can be very helpful to drive a proper clean energy transition (Hund et al. 2020; Airike et al. 2016; Deberdt and Billon 2021). Table 2 gathers the different minerals required for the energy transition (OECD 2021), considering the projected annual demand increase in 2050 with 2018 as the baseline scenario (less than 2 °C temperature increase scenario). Thereafter, a normalizing and scaling of the values from Table 2 will be done to integrate them in the CSR analysis (Sect. 3.4).

There are 17 different raw materials with a substantial increase of their demand (Table 2), which is particularly high for raw materials used in energy storage purposes as it can be seen with increase above 200% for, cobalt, graphite, nickel, lithium, indium and vanadium. While other elements are also crucial for power generation and transportation.

The total annual demand, in terms of tons, is not considered since the variation is very different depending on the type of mineral. In addition, the corrector factor is suggested solely for the minerals used in the transition to clean energy, taking into account the existing recycling rates. It must also be considered that these projections are based on no substitution or improvement in efficiency in the period analyzed, while the raw materials demanded are only for green energy technology, requiring additional materials for the power grid, construction materials, etc.

3.2 Recycling Potential

The possibility of obtaining resources from scratch and secondary sources may allow for the requirement of less or no additional resources from conventional mining activities. However, different factors may prevent achieving this goal: (a) It is difficult to reintroduce all the raw materials to the system (Castro et al. 2004; Meskers 2008), (b) many times it is not possible to recover the total quantity introduced in the system (Atherton 2007; Birat 2015) or with the quality required (Van Schaik and Reuter 2004; Gaustad et al. 2010), (c) the lack of an eco-design of the product and built elements makes it very difficult, or impossible, to recover all the elements, and, sometimes, the technique required for the recovery of one eliminates the possibility of recovering the other ones (Hagelüken 2007), (d) the raw materials demanded over the evolution of technology creates a disruption between the secondary raw materials available to recycle and the current demand, and (e) the economic growth generates a demand increase for raw materials compared to the available secondary sources (Buchner 2015; Ciacci et al. 2016).

Thus, there is a wide range of recycling efficiency depending on the raw material, requiring more or less production from traditional mining. Based on the publication from the International Resource Panel (UNEP 2013), five ranges of recycling rates are defined: (1) more than 50%, (2) 25–50%, (3) more than 10–25%, (4) 1–10%, and (5) less than 1%. A numeric value from 1 to 5 is used to define these recycling ranges. Table 3 displays the elements with the value defined, following the procedure described, that corresponds to their recycling rate. Subsequently, a normalizing and scaling of the recycling rates, shown in Table 3, will be carried out in order to make a joint analysis, as shown in Sect. 3.4.

Some elements, such as mercury, should not be considered in the analysis due to their environmental implications, and their prohibited usage. Aggregates and industrial minerals are kept out of the analysis due to the type of mining activity and its size and implications.

3.3 Regional Factors

Each region, all over the globe, has different requirements for raw materials based on the availability within its territory and the economic characteristics (Černý et al. 2021). Thus, the major world economies have developed some sort of list, such as the US, the European Union, Japan, Canada, Australia, and China. These studies are focused on achieving a more resilient system in terms of geopolitical and economic factors, ensuring the supply chain of raw materials, and considering recycling techniques and a circular approach.

In the case of the EU, the raw materials are analyzed as a function of supply risk (SR), from 0 to 7, and economic importance (EI), from 0 to 9. It is considered CRM when SR ≥ 1 and EI ≥ 2.8. Hence, it has been defined the criticality of raw materials as: criticality factor = SR × EI, as long as SR ≥ 1 and EI ≥ 2.8, with a minimum value of 2.8 and a maximum value of 63 defined by the EU criteria. The economic importance provides insight into the relevance of any material for the EU economy, considering the potential substitutes for that material. On the other hand, the supply risk displays the potential disruption of having at its disposal the specific material from the producing countries, considering the global supply mixture and country governance indicators. The potential critical stage is also considered in the EU approach: extraction or processing, as well as substitution and recycling possibilities. Table 4 gathers the supply risk, economic importance, based on the EU perspective, and the criticality factor by raw material as a result of multiplying the two first columns. Following this, the criticality factor will need to undergo a normalization and scaling process for integration into the proposed CSR analysis system.