Kunal Sinha, Global Head of Recycling at Glencore
Kunal Sinha is the Global Head of Recycling at Glencore. Glencore ranked number 21 on the Fortune Global 500 in 2023. As one of the world's largest commodities trader and one of the world's largest natural resource companies, they have a very substantial role in the energy transition and in climate change. Over one-third of Glencore's 2022 revenue came from coal, so from a climate perspective, the company has a substantial impact. Today, they also have a significant oil and gas business.
In Cody’s conversation with Kunal, we touched a bit on that, but we focus mostly on Glencore's mining and metals activities. This piece is part of what makes Glencore unique from most energy companies when it comes to the energy transition. Yes, it's in the business of fossil fuels, but it's also deeply in the business of extracting and processing a majority of key metals that will help us transition to an electrified future.
In his role as Global Head of Recycling, Kunal not only works to understand how Glencore's primary mining business operates but also is driving its initiatives around circularity and reuse. Mining has a reputation as a dirty business, and Glencore has had its share of environmental issues and controversies in the past. We appreciate Kunal for not shying away from these challenges and also helping us understand the important role that mining and Glencore have to play in the future and the importance of natural resource circularity as part of it.
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Episode recorded on Sept 27, 2023 (Published on Nov 13, 2023)
In this episode, we cover:
[3:02] Kunal's background and experience
[7:43] His work with sulfuric acid at Glencore
[13:54] An overview of Glencore and its recycling business
[25:03] Glencore's collaboration and partnership with startups
[29:49] An overview of Glencore's copper production and recycling
[37:26] An overview of Glencore's process for cobalt
[42:27] Kunal's predictions for recycled battery metals in EVs
[52:27] An overview of battery passports and Glencore's commitment to high ethical social governance standards
[1:01:13] Call for startups and mature companies to collaborate with Glencore in driving circularity
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Cody Simms:
On today's episode of My Climate Journey, our guest is Kunal Sinha, Global Head of Recycling at Glencore. Glencore is number 21 on the Fortune Global 500 in 2023, and as the world's largest commodities trader and as one of the world's largest natural resource companies, they have a very substantial role in the energy transition and in climate change.
First of all, over one-third of Glencore's 2022 revenue comes from coal. So from a climate perspective, the company has a substantial impact today. They also have a significant oil and gas business. In my conversation with Kunal, we touch a bit on that, but we focus mostly on Glencore's mining and metals activities. And this piece is part of what makes Glencore unique from most energy companies when it comes to the energy transition. Yes, it's in the business of fossil fuels, but it's also deeply in the business of extracting and processing a majority of key metals that will help us transition to an electrified future.
In his role as Global Head of Recycling, Kunal not only works to understand how Glencore's primary mining business works, but also is driving their initiatives around circularity and reuse. Mining has a reputation as a dirty business, and Glencore has had its share of environmental issues and controversies in the past. I appreciate Kunal for not shying away from these challenges and also helping us understand the important role that mining and Glencore have to play in the future, and the importance of natural resource circularity as part of it. But before we start, I'm Cody Sims.
Yin Lu:
I'm Yin Liu.
Jason Jacobs:
And I'm Jason Jacobs, and welcome to My Climate Journey.
Yin Lu:
This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms:
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help. Kunal, welcome to the show.
Kunal Sinha:
Thanks, Cody. Glad to be here.
Cody Simms:
Well, my goodness, I think a few months ago I was going through my LinkedIn or whatever and I saw a connection request and I looked at it and I was like, "Wait a minute. This guy's the Global Head of Recycling at Glencore, which is one of the largest natural resources companies in the world." Thanks for the add. I'm excited to meet you. And so with that, I think I immediately said, "Hey, I want to learn more about what you do because you're in the thick of a lot of stuff." And so with that, thanks for reaching out and thanks for joining us.
Kunal Sinha:
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Cody Simms:
Why don't we start with a little bit about your background, Kunal? So you are currently the Global Head of Recycling at Glencore. You've been in that role for a few years now, but you've been at the company for over a decade. So maybe start by explaining a little bit about your journey. You could start earlier than Glencore if you want, but how you ultimately got to the role you're in today?
Kunal Sinha:
Yeah, I think a lot of us have had a few twists and turns, and have to pivot a few times. I'm actually a mechanical engineer by training. I was fascinated by robotics when I was in undergrad, which was in India, and then I actually came to the US to pursue a PhD in robotics. So I was at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagn. So I didn't finish the PhD, but I did finish my master's in robotics and then got interested in consulting. So I spent about six years in management consulting, fairly globally, traveled a lot in consulting, which I did, and that was in a very different space back then. So mostly biotech, MedTech, healthcare, big pharma, small pharma. So pretty much if you want help with treating your diabetes, I still remember what you can do.
So I spent a lot of time there. So about six years. And then I guess I wanted to do something more and something with perhaps a little bit more direct P&L responsibility than consulting provides. So I took a break, did my MBA from London Business School. I was initially looking at things like private equity, but then yeah, Glencore came around. They had just IPO'd, so it was a very new name. I think pre-IPO, if you were not really in commodities, you wouldn't know who Glencore is. So there was a bit more awareness of the company.
Cody Simms:
By the way, I learned in a little bit of research I was doing before our conversation that Glencore is actually an acronym for Global Energy Commodity Resources, G-L-E-N-C-O-R-E, which I thought was interesting.
Kunal Sinha:
My understanding is there's no official statement to that effect, but that seems [inaudible 00:04:39].
Cody Simms:
Oh, okay. I'm starting rumors here on the pod.
Kunal Sinha:
But yes, there is some history there. So yeah, I think, look, I had no idea about commodities. I did an internship and I was just fascinated back then that there is this whole backbone of trade flows that pretty much powers everything you do in the world, from energy to metals to pretty much everything you use in daily life has materials. And usually I think the general awareness of where stuff is made these days has really declined to the extent that if you ask any average pretty smart person, like, "Hey, where do you think all the elements in this water bottle came from?" You wouldn't know.
And so it was quite fascinating. That whole sector was very opening up. Companies were going public, Glencore had gone public. So I got really interested in that commodity flow and that sector. So I did have the opportunity after my internship to join them full time. So I started in 2011 was my internship. I started in 2012. I started in the concentrates team.
Cody Simms:
That's a good success story for your MBA program, the conversion of internship to now running a huge business inside this company 10 years later.
Kunal Sinha:
Actually, there were a few people at the time. We actually started a commodities club at the London Business School, which now is thriving and doing well, which is great. But yeah, so I got into the business. Copper was always a good barometer for the economy, fascinating business. Again, even metal people understand concentrates is even more interesting. It's what you get out of mines. And this whole business was pretty much about you have these commodities, they're all over the world, and then you need to take them from where they're plentiful to where they're needed. That's pretty much commodity trading, and it was quite fascinating.
So I did that for about a year or two, and then Glencore acquired at the time a company called Xtrata, which was, I believe it was the biggest M&A transaction in mining at the time. And that opened up other opportunities. It was a huge transaction and I was asked to go to Canada to look at some of the businesses we had picked up as part of that transaction and try and make sense of it and integrate it with our business. So I moved back to Canada. I was in New York pre-MBA, then went to Switzerland and actually our first daughter was born in Switzerland, which was a very interesting experience.
Cody Simms:
Glencore's headquartered in Switzerland, yes?
Kunal Sinha:
We are. Yeah, it's a Swiss company. It's headquartered in this sleepy village called Baar or Zug. So yeah, so I came back to Canada, managed this group company, did a bunch of interesting things with them. So after spending three, four years there, I was just looking for the next challenge. And at the time, the leadership basically was looking at how do we... And I'll go into what Glencore does, but we have a very longstanding recycling business, and four or five years ago, even internally, it wasn't that well publicized if you may. And externally, if you ask people, "Hey, do you know Glencore does recycling?" Nobody would even know about it.
So it was a good business. It was scattered in a few different places and the idea was can we make sense of it, put it all together cohesively so that we can better explain it internally and externally and then of course grow it?
Cody Simms:
Before we even get into the recycling side, you had also spent quite a chunk of time developing a sulfuric acid business. Is that right? Inside Glencore?
Kunal Sinha:
Yeah, so that was the business I picked up, which is another fascinating. So if you think about sulfuric acid, it's the most used chemical in the world. It's about 240,000,000, 250,000,000 tons. It's everything people use on their daily. Like my fun story is if you brush your teeth, which I believe most people do these days, you are using sulfuric acid because when you brush your teeth, your toothpaste has abrasives and those silica particles, they come from precipitating silica using sulfuric acid, and we supply one of the only two producers in the world. So my fun joke is if you're brushing your teeth, there's 50% chance our sulfuric acid helped you keep it clean.
Cody Simms:
And one thing I've learned about companies in the natural resources space is it seems like when it comes to things like sulfuric acid, I don't know the details, but I'm going to guess here, it's most likely both a byproduct of some metal or mineral that you extract as well as a tool in driving extraction of a different metal or mineral. Is that accurate?
Kunal Sinha:
It's accurate, and it's a very interesting point you bring up. So if you're not in the space, you may miss the point, which is this industry is extremely efficient. Sulfuric acid is the case in point. So any non-ferrous metal that you produce, chances are the metal molecule coexists with a sulfur molecule. And so when you go through the process, you essentially have sulfur dioxide emissions, which about 50, 70 years ago, nobody was capturing, which led to acid drain. Of course that's not good, and smelters across the world now have very high capture.
Cody Simms:
Is this mostly zinc and lead?
Kunal Sinha:
Anything, zinc, lead, nickel, copper, any non-ferrous metal usually will have... The national geology will include some sulfur. There's other types of ores that don't have, but many do.
Cody Simms:
That's right. I guess we have heard historically of copper being a heavy acid rain causing metal.
Kunal Sinha:
Yeah, you can look at that. Now, the funny thing is just to spend a minute on that, if you look at USGS data, actually now the US farmland soil is sulfur deficient, and one of the reasons, it's a funny reason, is that there's no more acid drain, which is good, but then your natural sulfur is depleting. So now you have a situation where the fertilizer companies are actually adding sulfur to the fertilizer because you need the sulfur molecule in the soil to have good crops.
It's a fascinating business. So you produce byproduct sulfuric acid, so you are actually extracting extra value from the same concentrate from which you make metal, but then that sulfuric acid gets used in crazy number of applications, all the way from mining to fertilizers, corn starch food grade, corn starch, you need sulfuric acid for that, pulp and paper, lead acid batteries, advanced chemicals, nuclear power plants, steel. It's basically the most used chemical in the world.
Cody Simms:
So you ran this business and presumably, I'm going to guess, it gave you some incredible insights into resource circularity to some extent?
Kunal Sinha:
Yeah, and I think it doesn't get its day in the limelight, if you ask me. I think sulfuric acid is an amazing cradle to grave story. You are turning a byproduct, which usually if you didn't capture causes acid drain. So you're turning it into a very useful critical reagent. There are industrial plants that will shut down if they don't get sulfuric acid on time, and we ran one of the largest supply networks for sulfuric acid in North America. Then part of my job was we expanded it, we connected it with the global markets, we opened input terminals. We run a fleet of 4,000 rail cars all over North America.
And so I think it's a great sustainability story. It's basically upcycling the... It's not recycling, but it's upcycling the as SO2 molecule into actually a very critical chemical without which, for example, half the water treatment plants, municipal water treatment plants in the US need sulfuric acid to run. So it gave me not just an overview of the resource sector, but also all of these various use cases and how integrated this gets into all kinds of industries. It was a fascinating business to manage and grow.
Cody Simms:
And so then you're going to tell us a story, but get introduced to this opportunity to become the Global Head of Recycling, which I presume has a lot of responsibilities around metal separation, metals recycling, of which probably sulfuric acid also plays a role, a significant role in that, right? I think of hydrometallurgy is like how EV batteries are presumably getting recycled in many cases, and that is a sulfuric acid application, right?
Kunal Sinha:
Life comes full circle. Somebody I met once told me, "You always cross paths twice in life." So I crossed paths once with sulfuric acid and now crossing again because of recycling. So that's a great thing. Yeah. So the recycling story, basically, yes, I was looking for the next challenge. The company was thinking about reorganizing, restructuring the recycling business a bit, which Glencore has been recycling or our assets have been recycling some of them since 1940s. But again, people didn't know about it.
So we created this new role. We pulled some of the internal resources together, tried to create a more cohesive business unit that focuses on this, and there were people already. So it's just a matter of pulling things together, and I started in that about four years ago. Maybe I can just give a... At this point, it's helpful to understand what Glencore is and why recycling sits within there and why is it important, just to give you some thought.
So if you're not aware of Glencore, we are a pretty large, very global natural resources company. The way I like to talk about the company is we supply the energy of today, and that is based on coal or oil. We have pretty substantial presence in supplying that energy of today, but we also are one of the largest in what I call energy of tomorrow, which is going to be these metals that are empowering the energy transition.
Glencore is also, I think one of the first mining companies in the world to commit to a net-zero by 2050 ambition. A big part of that is we are committing to ramping down our coal production as consistent with those goals. So I won't go into that detail, but I look at the energy transition, it's a transition. All transitions have to be very carefully managed, right?
So I sit in the company, I look at it and I see the company is supplying the energy of today. You can't just take your foot off that pedal, so you need to try and achieve a ramp down and a ramp up, and you have to coordinate it, and I feel like Glencore's doing a good job at that coordination.
Cody Simms:
Well, this is one of the reasons I was so excited to have you on the pod, because from where I sit, Glencore seems like a very unique company in that you have oil and gas majors or whatever that are pretty much in the business of oil and gas. You have companies that maybe do coal, but you guys work in oil and gas. You work in coal, but you also work in all of these metals that are driving the future of an electrified economy from an energy perspective. And you're having to find the balance of in what timeframe and how quickly you're able to transition.
You've also had, and you're not shy about it, it's all of your website, you've had some complex issues in the past with environmental issues in various countries you operate in, labor practice issues in various countries you operate in. And frankly, I presume, hopefully are learning from that and figuring out the right way to do things going forward, because this is hard stuff, right, that you're doing?
Kunal Sinha:
Absolutely, and thank you for putting it that way. It's a very difficult balance, but I feel like, I often talk about transitions, if you look at any transition in the history of the world or a transition for a company that went through a transition, any transition, by definition, transitions have to be carefully managed, otherwise you get it messy. If you don't time demand with supply and things like those, you will have shocks. And I feel like the company is doing a very responsible job of playing its role in the transition. So Glencore itself is transitioning, dealing with the issues. We've come out and publicly talked about, accepted some issues in the past. It's a whole different company now. I'm very proud to be here and see the change that the company's... So we have our own transition, but then we are playing this role in the energy transition where, yes, we supply the energy of today and we are investing in the energy of tomorrow.
And if I talk about the energy of tomorrow, I mean just quick credentials. We're the world's largest cobalt producer, the third-largest class one nickel producer. Class one nickel is what goes in batteries for EVs. And we are a very large copper producer. We have more than a million tons of ore in production. We trade copper. We have another line of sight into another million tons of copper production that we can bring online if we want to. And then we recently started looking at lithium from a marketing trading perspective. So I think, frankly speaking, Glencore is a very unique combination of all of these things. I'm yet to find a company that has this combination.
Where recycling comes into all this is, again, we've been recycling the same metals for a very long period of time. Copper since the early 1940s. We were one of the first in the world to invent the process for extracting copper and precious metals from end of life electronics or, as people like to call, e-waste. I try not to use the word waste because our view is everything is a resource. So we like to call it end of life electronics. So we started that in 1986. So since 1986, we have been extracting copper and precious metals from end end of life electronics. We've now recycled more than a million tons of circuit boards, chips and wires from all your electronics, which means we probably have helped divert, I don't know, 10 times that number, 10 million or so in device weight from not going into landfill or ending up in a developing country. So we've been doing that.
When it comes to battery metals, nickel and cobalt, we've been recycling them since the '90s. We've been recycling actual lithium-ion batteries and black mass, which is a very, I guess, that's a term everyone knows now since the early 2000s. So if you step back from it, we are one of the largest primary producers and suppliers of these battery metals. We are very longstanding recyclers of the same metals. So effectively, the way I look at it is Glencore is very uniquely positioned to effectively close the loop. So you produce the molecule, you supply it to where it needs to be to power the energy transition, but then our recycling business helps bring back that molecule and recycle it and put it back into circulation. So that's the business. And if you combine the primary side of the business, the recycling side of the business, effectively our ambition is to be the lifetime custodians of the molecules we produce and help put them in a perpetual recycle loop.
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:16:04]
Cody Simms:
How do you, inside the company, balance the competing economic challenges of the economics around virgin metal extraction, production relative to the unit economics of recycling? And when those two are at odds, how do you deal with it?
Kunal Sinha:
I get asked this question many times. So I love to answer this question because the answer's very easy. It is very logical to say that in a mining company, and a typical mining company is interested in producing as much of the metal as possible and selling it. That if you say, "Oh, by the way, now I'm going to just recycle the metal, put it back in the market," then it may be at odds with what the mining side of the business wants to do. The reality, at least for us, is it's not the case because they are actually quite linked and work very harmoniously together. I'll explain why.
First, there's a macro reason. The macro reason is where we sit today. Between now and 2050, the amount of copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium that we expect to need is far more than any rational forecast on how much new production can come from mines. So no matter what you do, look, we definitely need more mining. I think even tech companies like Google and others have now come out and said, "We need more mining." We need more mining, we need more responsible mining, we need more metal. So however fast you want to go on that journey, you still can't close the gap. And I think that's where on a macro level, not a Glencore level, on a macro level, these are actually very synergistic because responsible mining gets you more production.
I won't say recycling, I call it circularity. And I think circularity, circular economy is actually synonymous to responsible consumption. We need to change behavior patterns, we need to change consumption behavior for you and I and my kids and others, which is we have to be less wasteful. We have to believe in repair, repurposing, product life extension and recycling and all of those things. So that reduces the pressure, but the gap is still there. So at a macro level, I don't see these two things competing. Now when it comes to Glencore, and when the rubber hits the road internally, what happens is what we do, is we utilize our primary assets, so smelters and refiners. We take the same asset. Now, the beauty of what Glencore is, we're quite privileged to have this, is our assets can treat very complex materials and we have metallurgical teams that are extremely creative and innovative. So what ends up happening, take an example of our copper smelter-
Cody Simms:
Sorry, just to interrupt you. You all actually own and operate most of these facilities. You're not a marketing or trading firm sitting on top of these. You're actually running the processes.
Kunal Sinha:
There are marketing and trading teams in Glencore where we own all these assets and mines and supply chains, and then we have third party materials.
Cody Simms:
That's right. You do have the marketing and trading, but you also actually do the processing?
Kunal Sinha:
Right. And we have these assets. So if you take the example of our copper smelter, it's the same smelter that is taking the primary mining feeds, but it's the same smelter that also takes all the recycling feeds. And the reason that it works that way is if you look at primary mining and if you're in the mining world, if not, then it's a good 60 seconds for you. Which is, for most of these metals, we have been mining for decades or centuries. So all the very high grade deposits are depleting. And the new mines you go into, the grades are going down and down and down. Also, you have less precious metals in these ores.
So what we end up doing is by blending the primary feeds with the recycled feeds, we achieve a few things. The recycling feeds in general have higher grades and have more precious metals. So by providing the same smelter, more of the recycling feeds, they're able to recover more precious metals, more copper, which is good for their business. So they love it. It's not like the guy calls me and says, "Hey, why are you sending more to recycling? I can't produce more copper." No, they love it. And we love it because we are able to do recycling at a million tons sort of scale. I'm using a smelter that runs at almost a million tons. So that order of magnitude, compared to a dedicated recycling setup, which can do 50,000 tons or 30,000 tons, my unit cost economics for the recycling part comes down substantially because I'm sharing in that fixed cost. So internally it's not a competition.
Cody Simms:
You as the head of recycling need to figure out how to fund whatever extractor or thing, like take an EV battery that is actually cracking the battery and shredding it and doing whatever you need to do to get to the metals in it. So presumably, you as the head of recycling would fund that component of it, but then the outputs of that would just feed into the standard processing facility for lithium or cobalt or whatnot. I know I'm overly simplistic here and I don't understand the nuance myself.
Kunal Sinha:
So there's two concepts. So one is, we are big fans of taking the primary feeds and the recycling feeds and taking it to the same asset because of some of these advantages I just mentioned. And because of that, it's not a competition. It's actually a lot of harmony and efficiency. The reason I like it is, yes, we need to massively scale recycling. We are on record saying we want to grow our recycling business exponentially. The best way to grow something exponentially is to do it very profitably. And the best way to do something very profitably is to have good cost curves. And I'm not trying to get very techie or talk in a startup fashion, but I think that means you need scale. This gives us scale, low cost, you can do massive amounts of this. So it's all about big scale and growing this at a crazy pace. So that's why I like this setup.
Now when it gets into EV and the point you mentioned, broadly, yes. But I think that it gets into the nuances of that space. So the approach we have taken is, yes, we have existing assets that can do some of these things and we are investing in those assets to do other things like lithium recovery, for example. But we are also looking at who else is out there who is doing something good? Because Glencore is a huge company. It's a big company-
Cody Simms:
Yeah, for sure.
Kunal Sinha:
We are very entrepreneurial, but we're still very large. There's a lot of exciting startups in this space who are also doing good work. And then there are automakers, there are other people in this ecosystem. So can we have collaboration and partnerships which allow us to accelerate what we want to do? And so that's been the focus. So in the last two, three years, we've been focusing on partnerships, investments to curate literally a platform. And so we ended up investing in a few startups, I'm on the board of one, and we have made other partnerships. So for us now looking forward, it's all about collaboration and partnerships. So it'll include our assets and do what I just described, but we also want to work with partners and collaborators in the space.
Cody Simms:
And how much of your responsibility is getting down to essentially a raw material that the processing facility can buy at cost parity with virgin metal, virgin ore, whatever? And how much of it is actually working with them on what the right blends are of virgin ore and recycled material coming out of your processing?
Kunal Sinha:
It kind of goes hand in hand. So if you take only a commercial view and just say, look, I'm just going to find a whole bunch of recycled material and just give it to you, or just a lot of copper or nickel or cobalt, lithium, whatever, and just give it to you, that's one way to do it. That's a setup where let's say the marketing or trading teams are very hands off from the assets, and the assets just do their own thing. You can do it, but I think it's going to be inefficient. In our world, we are a matrix organization. There's basically, if you come to Glencore, you look at our business cards, there's no titles. So we get very technical. So me, my team, other colleagues, we actually get very technical. We get into the metallurgy of these materials, we get into the chemistry, we look at flow sheets of our smelters or hydromat plants, and you really have to find the fit between the processing and the feed because that's where you can either make or lose a lot of money. So that's one.
Second is our environmental responsibility. We have to be very careful on what can get processed where at the highest environmental standards possible. So again, you can't just say, oh, here's some scrap or some batteries or something. I'm getting a good price for it, so let me just buy it. Can't do that. You have to look at, do I need a permit for it? Where I want to send it, is it permitted to process it? So you really need to understand regs as well as the actual technical capability of processing. So you have to really wear both hats for this to work. I'm very proud that our teams can do that.
So we work very, very closely with the assets. We work very closely with the supply side. And then of course, on the other end, which is the recycled metal that comes out, that's another interesting space. So we are looking at some interesting creative ideas. Something we piloted recently is a recycled metal credit. I don't believe anyone else has done it so far. So we piloted it. And it's basically a concept like renewable energy certificates. It's a similar concept, but for recycled metal.
Cody Simms:
It exists in plastics for sure, right? Like the recycled plastics product.
Kunal Sinha:
In recycled plastics, yes. But for metals, we are trying it and exploring, is this something people want? Will it have credibility? Because I know offsets get a bad name these days and we don't want this to be lumped with offsets as well. So we're trying a lot of these things. So basically, the role actually cuts across all of these three pillars. So that's what makes life interesting and keeps me motivated and passionate about doing this.
Yin Lu:
Hey everyone. I'm Yin, a partner at MCJ Collective, here to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. Each week we're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and points of view. What we all share is a deep curiosity to learn, and a bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change.
Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams have met, several nonprofits have been established, and a bunch of hiring has been done. Many early stage investments have been made as well as ongoing events and programming like monthly women in climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, climate book club, art workshops and more. Whether you've been in the climate space for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and click on the members tab at the top. Thanks, and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms:
You mentioned you and your team like to dive into the technicalities of it. We're not going to dive deep into the technicalities, but let's at least dive into a little bit of the surface level technicalities of some of these metals that you work in. So copper, let's start there. It's incredibly abundant. It looks like you all extract and process copper ore in South America, Democratic Republic of Congo, Australia. You do recycling in North America. What, generally, today does the copper production look like? And how does recycling fit into that?
Kunal Sinha:
Copper is very interesting. Sometimes it's very tricky, but these numbers put things in perspective, the channel, right? So I read this on one of the blogs, and so I haven't done the numbers myself, but I believe they're true. Somebody took all the USGS data on copper production. And copper is a metal we've known since the Bronze Age, whatnot. So we're producing copper since centuries. So if you add up all the production, it seems, until today, we have produced 700 million tons of copper. And between today and 2050, according to IPCC, IEA, like tech, any other projection. So between today and 2050, we need to produce a thousand million tons of copper, some order of magnitude. Those numbers are probably wrong, but that's the order of magnitude. So you have to produce a little more than what you have produced so far. So since minus infinity to today, whatever you have produced, in the next 28 years, you have to produce more than that. So how are you going to do that?
Cody Simms:
And that's primarily driven by the need for electric wiring, right, as the primary use case?
Kunal Sinha:
Yeah, electric wiring, solar panels, offshore wind, EVs have more copper in them, all of that, batteries are copper foils, people don't talk about it. So it's a big challenge. So what happens is, today the refined consumption market is just shy of 30 million tons, 29 and change, of which about 6 million tons comes from recycled sources, 6, 7, 8, goes up and down. And one of the challenges is how can you take it even higher because you need more and more copper. So I don't think anybody who is in the primary mining of copper has any reason to panic.
Cody Simms:
What does primary mining of copper look like today?
Kunal Sinha:
So primary mining is either underground or open pit mines. You have sulfide or oxide deposits. They get treated a little differently, but basically you'll have a mine, you'll take out the ore, you concentrate it. It literally means you concentrate the grade of copper. So you go from half a percent per ton or 1% to 30%. You concentrate it.
Cody Simms:
Yeah, but a mine, you have these big, giant, monster trucks with it, or big dump trucks. Essentially, you're dropping this ore in it and you're taking it to some processing facility.
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:32:04]
Kunal Sinha:
Yep, so you take it to what's called a concentrator. The job of a concentrator is try and pull out as much rock and leave as much copper as possible. Concentrates tend to be 25, 30% roughly. Then that goes to a few different processes, but the most common, you'll take it to a smelter. And then the smelter will get you to almost 98, 99% copper.
Cody Simms:
And the concentration piece is, that's where the sulfuric acid is coming in heavily? Is that correct?
Kunal Sinha:
It comes in if you have oxide or you will leach it with sulfuric acid and extract the copper. If you have sulfide or which has the sulfur molecule, that's what goes to a smelter and ends up producing the sulfuric acid, which you bring back in the oxide. So, it's a big, nice, cradle to grave story there. And then these smelters produce 99-ish percent copper. We call them anodes. Then they go into a refinery, which is a hydromet process, and that's where you get 99.999% pure copper, gold, silver. You'll have all of these things from refineries, but that's a massive slab of copper. And from there, it has its own journey.
Cody Simms:
And are these supply chains relatively local, or is this stuff getting shipped around the world for this to happen, typically?
Kunal Sinha:
Some of it is local. Some of it gets shipped around the world. I mean, we operate the only copper smelter in Canada now, and we operate the only copper refinery that can also do precious metals and platinum group metals in all of North America. And I think if you think about it, historically, the mines were where the mines are. That's natural geology and way back when, the smelters were built close to the mines. But now, you also have this concept of a custom smelter. And a custom smelter is a smelter that's not tied to a mine. It can be wherever it's freight economic to put it. And then you just bring all kinds of copper feeds and then you produce copper.
So, our smelter in Canada is a custom smelter. It used to be tied to a mine. The mine shut down in 1976. And so, that's amazing because the guys reinvented themselves from being a captive smelter to one of the biggest recycling smelters in the world and treating all kinds of concentrates and still going. We will have the 100th year anniversary of that smelter in 2027.
Cody Simms:
That's the primary process story for copper. And then as recycling starts to happen and blend into this, what does that look like?
Kunal Sinha:
Recycling has its own story. Recycling, as you and I use products, we discard them, somebody collects them. Not everything gets collected. So, let's take end-of-life electronics as a good example. Only about 18% gets collected in the world. The rest is lost or goes to landfill, which is sad. But once it's collected in a proper channel, it goes through a recycler that sits upstream of us. They will dismantle it. And the reason they are dismantling it is they're trying to create like piles of materials, plastics, ferrous metals like steel and non-ferrous. The non-ferrous is things like your circuit board, chips, wires, ICs, all of that good stuff.
Cody Simms:
This is everything from my laptop to my phone to my refrigerator when I move out of my house or whatever.
Kunal Sinha:
Yeah, your toaster, your AirPods, your whatever, anything that has any kind of electronics. Then that third pile, non-ferrous is what comes to us. And when it comes to us, we do a few things. We have the responsibility to put a value on it. So, if I gave you just a truckload of phones, which by the way, we have received a truckload of phones, how do you know how much copper is in it? You don't. So, we go through a very extensive process of trying and establishing a representative sample, and that's a service we provide to the industry. We have sampling plants whose job is to just take the material and come up with a representative sample, so that we can tell our suppliers how much copper or gold or silver or whatever is in it.
I'll give you another sidebar example. We also run for one of the world's largest semiconductor companies, we manage all of their manufacturing scrap, which is 30, 40, 50 sites across the world. There, we are providing IP protection service. We safely destruct any chips coming off the line so it can't be counterfeited, and then we bring it all back to America and we recycle it to give them value for it. So, these are various post-consumer, post manufacturing, slightly different. But once it comes into our supply chain, we have done the sampling, then we basically blend it.
So, a smelter is a very complex... You're running a very complex chemical reaction and you just have to balance it. So, you will come up with a blend in real time of the primary feed and this recycled feed, which keeps the smelter balanced in all kinds of different KPIs. But once it goes in, then what comes out is your copper.
Cody Simms:
By the way, I'm hearing a good use case for a software focused startup in your space, which is helping with those blends and balances, right?
Kunal Sinha:
Yeah, there's actually a lot of companies that are already trying to innovate in the space. Now, you can run digital twins of these plants. So, once it enters that stream, then it goes through what I explained earlier. You'll make a copper anode or copper cathode, and it goes forward. Another hot topic these days seem to be batteries or EV batteries. It's slightly different.
Cody Simms:
Let's do that. Let's do the virgin metals portion of either cobalt or nickel. You choose, and let's go through the flow on that too.
Kunal Sinha:
Yeah. So, the virgin metal part is very similar to how I explained copper. So, it will go to... See, cobalt is usually a byproduct. Cobalt is usually a byproduct of copper. Very few cobalt deposit exist on their own. Usually cobalt coexists with copper or nickel. And at least in our system, we recover the cobalt through our nickel refineries and nickel smelters.
Cody Simms:
Cobalt is actually relatively small quantities we're talking about, relative to some of these other metals like copper and nickel, right?
Kunal Sinha:
In current batteries, yes, yes, yeah. But the thing with cop, now we are getting very technical. I had a discussion with one of the much smarter guys at a national lab in the US, and he was explaining the significance of cobalt to me. And in his non-technical way of explaining to me was, cobalt is what holds everything together. So, you always need a safe amount of cobalt to try... Now, of course, you have cobalt-free batteries like LFP, which is fine, but on the NMC side, its used has come down, but it's still needed.
Cody Simms:
NMC, meaning nickel, manganese, cobalt.
Kunal Sinha:
Nickel, manganese, cobalt, right. The primary pathway to those metals is very similar to copper, so I don't want to repeat it. And in years past, what we were able to do is take lithium-ion batteries through the same pathway because they have the same nickel and cobalt, and we were able to recover, like I explained for copper, similar to nickel and cobalt, we were able to precipitate and recover at the same time nickel and cobalt from primary and nickel and cobalt from secondary.
Now, what changed? What changed is, I would say around, let's say, 3, 4, 5 years ago, a few things happened. So, now, you have this concept of a gigafactory in this space. Why is it relevant? Because gigafactories are a massive concentrated source of manufacturing scrap, which was previously not that big of a thing. Then the second thing is the battery itself has changed. Lithium ion battery recycling is not a new thing. Your laptop and phone batteries have always been recycled since 20 years ago. But recycling an EV battery is not the same as recycling your phone battery. It's a massively huge piece of equipment. It has a state of charge that's much bigger. You have safety issues. It's a whole different ballgame. So, that is second.
And third is lithium. So, lithium prices were, let's say, non-exciting for a long period of time. And then about two or so years ago, lithium skyrocketed.
Cody Simms:
Well, and the virgin lithium extraction actually process is quite different than these other metals we've talked about. Correct?
Kunal Sinha:
It is different. You're right. So, all of these factors have to be now considered going forward, and we have looked at it as well. So, you need to recover value for lithium and provide it. You need to be able to handle these large format batteries. And there is this new source of manufacturing scrap, which is gigafactories in America, in Europe, which you want to be able to provide for.
So, in that sense, we've made some changes and we've made some moves. So, we've invested in technology. We've also invested in other companies that have pathway to lithium extraction. We have looked at what is the best way to provide the service to gigafactories of taking that scrap that they're producing and recycling it. These OEMs and gigafactories increasingly want to talk about circularity. So, how can you provide traceability of what happens to that material? How can you return the metal back? These are new business models being formed.
Cody Simms:
How much have you seen the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits of domestication of supply chain of these metals pushing these conversations forward?
Kunal Sinha:
Oh, it's been a huge push. Actually, just came back from D.C. Where the Department of Energy was hosting this Deploy conference to basically talk about these topics. I think IRA has done a great job for recycling, and I don't know if people realize it, because I think the rest of the IRA is well understood, like, okay, credits for buying EVs, support for CAM plants, all of those things. But what they have also done is they have basically said, if you can produce metal from recycling, then they're viewing that as a domestic source of critical metal production, which is a amazing way of redefining recycling.
Cody Simms:
So, these metals could be originally mined, produced in China, created in a Chinese battery, and then ultimately, sold in the US, recycled on shore, and now, it's considered a US metal.
Kunal Sinha:
Now, it's considered US metal, yes. And then you get production tax credit for it. You get investment tax credit for it, and the DOE has invested a lot of dollars in the recycling space. So, that's actually hugely positive for the industry, and same in Europe. If you look at Europe, the equivalent of this is going on in Europe and it's hugely supportive for the recycling industry. So, I think Inflation Reduction Act, the EU CRM innovation grants, they have been game changers in this space, and we've just started. There's a lot more to come and I think it'll be a good time for this industry.
Cody Simms:
How would you define what would be meaningful in terms of percentages of battery metals that are generated specifically for EV? Sorry to go into that very specific topic, but it's so top of mind for a lot of people. Percentages of battery metals in an EV process that are coming from recycled sources, what is meaningful to achieve in a near term time horizon?
Kunal Sinha:
I think just given the massive ladder that we have to climb in terms of how many EVs we want to put on the roads, the goal is to get as many EVs out there as possible. And to do that, you'll find the most practical, fastest scalable way to do that. So, I don't want to put my very myopic recycling hat on and give a very crazy target, which slows down that because that actually is counterproductive. My expectation is, look, I think if you look at an example from another world, lead acid batteries, through whatever journey it took. Today, if you buy a lead acid battery, about 99% of the lead in there is coming from recycled.
Cody Simms:
Oh, wow.
Kunal Sinha:
Or some crazy high number like that, maybe 98.
Cody Simms:
Wow.
Kunal Sinha:
I don't know exact, but it's that-
Cody Simms:
Sure, whatever. Significant.
Kunal Sinha:
Significant. Now, I think that's an aspirational goal, but it took the lead acid industry a huge amount of time to get to where it is today. It will take a similar amount of time probably for EV batteries. So, it's very hard to put a date on this. I would say this is something that happens. Substantially, everything being recycled is a matter of 100 million EVs running on roads and being sold every year. That's probably a post 2050-ish scenario but-
Cody Simms:
Because there's just not enough supply of batteries to be recycled until that critical mass is there?
Kunal Sinha:
Yeah. So, I think if you look at it, recycling is not a standalone business. To recycle something, you must first produce it. The other thing I said, people would say, "Well, you're a recycling guy. Why are you saying this? If an EV can run for 15 years instead of 10, my view is it should run for 15 years. Because why do you want to artificially shorten a product's life? Every product we are using has an impact on the earth. And so, the longer you can use a product, it's better for all of us. So, between all of that, I think in this decade to early next, what you can recycle is mostly manufacturing scrap. The holy grail of end-of-life EV batteries and recycling and EVs themselves, it's probably a matter of the next decade.
So, first of all, you have that supply side problem. So, to have enough recycled metal, you must have enough feedstock. And also, think about it. If you are running a gigafactory, your goal is not to produce massive amounts of scrap. Your goal is to run an efficient factory and produce the minimum logical amount of scrap because any production process has some scrap, right? So, keeping all those pragmatic things in mind, I think it will take a number of years, decades longer before you get to very high double-digit rates of recycled metal. So, it's hard for me to give a date and a number.
What I do think, ordinality wise, I believe you will get there on cobalt first, followed by nickel, followed by lithium. That's the order I would think. Sometimes, people don't think of copper when they think about EV batteries or EVs. Copper is a huge amount of... Is a very important metal in an electric battery. I like to joke with people, you can produce energy many different ways. You can store energy many different ways, but the little engineer and science guy in me knows you can only conduct electricity, best is gold. Next, silver which we're not going to use, is copper. So, we need copper.
And so, I think if you look at recycled copper use in these things, yeah, again, already almost 20, 30% of the copper market is recycled. So, you will have good rates there, but I think that-
Cody Simms:
What was your order again? Say your order again a second time just-
Kunal Sinha:
I would say cobalt, nickel, lithium.
Cody Simms:
And where does copper factor into that? That's already happening now, I guess.
Kunal Sinha:
It's already happening now. People just don't measure it. And I think copper should be taken more seriously than it is today by the EV industry.
Cody Simms:
For you, in your role, I mean we talk a lot about EVs and whatnot on this podcast, but if you took a step back and weren't thinking about it just from the perspective of an EV battery market, where are you spending most of your time broadly, what drives the recycling business of Glencore today, and what do you expect will drive it 10 years from now?
Kunal Sinha:
It comes down to what we can recycle and what problems can we solve for the industry. And what we can recycle, the big things we can recycle are resource streams. I like to think of them as resource streams. We have been doing a lot of, as I said, end-of-life electronic semiconductors and those sorts of things. They are a huge part of our business. They'll continue to be a huge part of our business, but I don't think they will see the exponential growth that the other part, which also we are very good at, have been doing for 20 years or so but now is changing like we discussed, is lithium ion batteries.
So, I think we will see the growth on the electronic space. We're spending a lot of time talking to governments and civil society and other players on how can you increase the collection rate from 18% to maybe 30%, 40%. So, there's a lot of effort that we can do there. Again, that's not a space we play in, but we have a responsibility to educate the policymakers and others, so we do that. And then make sure we have the metallurgical capacity to match when that happens. So, we are spending some time there.
When it comes to the battery space on lithium ion batteries, that requires investment. So, Glencore's already making investments. Partnerships, we have already announced a number of partnerships, and it's reimagining some of this business. So, there's a lot of talk about circularity and what circular business models look like. And we are ready, capable, and already driving some of that dialogue. So, we spend a lot of time with OEMs, with gigafactories, with policymakers, with task forces of various countries who are asking us for inputs. It's just curating that circular ecosystem, if you may. And for practical reasons, Europe and North America is a focus simply because there's a lot of OEM manufacturing gigafactories in these two regions. We have assets in these regions and these conversations are catching on faster, let's say, than at the moment in Asia. But we are working on those markets too. So we spend a lot of time in this part of the space.
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]
Cody Simms:
So I'm hearing you say today the core recycling business is driven by manufacturing, scrap, essentially reusing metals from those byproducts. But all the attention and time that we spend talking about EV battery recycling and I guess you said don't call it e-waste, and all of that is apt because that is likely to be the growth driver of your business in the decades to come.
Kunal Sinha:
I think so. I think you'll see growth on the end of life electronics space. There's a huge question mark on solar panels. We didn't talk about it and we don't have to, but there's 20 million tons or some crazy number like that off solar panels that will come offline upgrading to the new PV cells. What happens to all that? So we are doing some R&D there. It's a portfolio approach. The electronic side of the business I think will grow, but won't see exponential sort of growth. Lithium and battery is huge. Then there are new things like solar panels. I'll quickly mention one other thing, which is we shred automobiles. We shred 20 million cars a year in the United States. That is a lot of metal, all kinds of metal, and we are closely watching that space and seeing how can that space be more efficient.
There is some new ways to recover copper from there that was previously going to landfill, for example. So we are plugged into that conversation and helping recover more copper from there. So it's a matter of not just saying, "Hey, we only do EV battery recycling because it sounds really, really sexy." It's really a portfolio of these five or 10 markets, if you may. Some will have a slower longer growth profile. Others probably will see an exponential growth and you want to have a approach where you can address all of them and have different strategies for each. That's a more diversified business. That's how we look at our business and so we end up spending time in all of these verticals.
Cody Simms:
And then I think the last topic I have for you, we talked about how Glencore is a new company that's got a new forward focus, but there have been these challenges in the past. How do you see labor practices broadly evolving in the natural resources space, particularly in many countries that themselves don't necessarily have high social standards, don't necessarily have the amount of regulation that you might have in the United States, for example. How is the space evolving to recognize its place in the world as a responsible steward of the planet and of humanity as these needs, these incredible crushing needs for these resources that you are finding continue to grow upon us?
Kunal Sinha:
No, I think it's a very important timely question. A lot of people have to ask these questions to themselves. We certainly are very serious about it because if you think about it's very clear that we do need these metals to deliver on the energy transition. That's something that nobody debates anymore. You definitely need copper, cobalt, lithium, you need these metals. If there was a parallel universe in which you didn't need these metals and still avoid climate change and one and a half degrees or higher rise of temperatures, then we will know it by now. But for now, what we know and all our scientists know and researchers know is this.
So it's a given that you need more metal production. Then you also know that the big old deposits that were all in easy to reach places in let's say western market, they're all already tapped into. So any new mines, new production is going to come from difficult jurisdictions or difficult geology or there's something difficult about them. Otherwise, we would already have been probably mining them. So these are important questions. So I think the approach there is if you think about it, I'll bring a different angle into this. So somebody recently asked me why is battery passport that important, this whole interesting... I'm sure you know about battery passports, like-
Cody Simms:
No, no. Explain it for those of us who don't know real quickly.
Kunal Sinha:
So battery passports are a concept typically around on blockchain. The idea is EV batteries have a lot of these nuances about what kind of metal was used, how it was produced, what kind of ESG standards, traceability. So battery passport is sort of this concept where you may have this independently verifiable blockchain where all parts of the value chain put their information so that whoever needs to verify, whether it's to give you IRX subsidies or for an OEM to check traceability of where the metals came from, or for you as the car owner to know the health of a battery, you can just look into this digital passport and it has all the information, and it actually ties back to your question. So if you look at where we are now in the hunt for these metals, if you take example of two of these metals, cobalt usually present in the DRC, nickel present across the world, but there's been a lot of recent push in Indonesia.
Both countries have historically different challenges on extraction of these metals. In the DRC, there is an issue with artisanal mining. People have issues with that. So I think where things like digital passports help is if you look at our operations, we run a very clean operations. Operating standards are very high. We're proud about it. We routinely bring customers and OEMs to come and take a look. There's audits that happen. So some ways we are addressing that in that, let's say... I'll give you one use of technology there. So we recently this public information, we've recently come out and said, we will provide a very high resolution satellite imagery of our operations on a very frequent basis. So you can basically go on our website and see what's happening and you can look at it and say, "Okay, good. That cobalt-copper operation in the DRC clearly is not affected by artisanal mining." And I'm not really commenting on the ethicality of artisanal mining. It's a very complex topic. It's being handled in its forum.
Cody Simms:
What is artisanal mining?
Kunal Sinha:
Basically, use of child labor to extract cohort.
Cody Simms:
Okay. Got it. Okay.
Kunal Sinha:
So we are using technology and traceability and whatnot to explain that, okay, there is this asset. It is in the DRC simply because 80% of the world's is found in the DRC and you can look at the standards at which we run our operations and now we are providing the satellite feeds and it's on our website and people can look at it. So there's just one example of how you have to look at it. A flip side to that, let's say again in our nickel Indonesia, there's a huge influx of expected influx of nickel from Asia, but in Malaysia does have some environmental historical challenges with nickel mining. So again, how are you going to-
Cody Simms:
And that it's a contributor to deforestation I think would be one of them, right? Yeah.
Kunal Sinha:
Right. Also, the impurity levels in the oceans, the fisheries and whatnot. So my point is in any of these cases, you will have operations that are world class that will adhere to not just some external standards, but they'll have their own internal standards that are really world class and Glencore has its own, but not to make a point only about Glencore. So in any of these types of jurisdictions going forward, you will have to have ways that people can convince themselves and not just matter of convincing. You can verify that the operations that I am sourcing my metal from are operating at a high ethical social governance standards, to the standards that I like and I will hence source from there. And there may be other operations that may not meet those standards. So it's very complex topic. It gets into the now push for third party governance standards Standards are fine. The question is you can't have a thousand different standards because how do you then qualify for each sort of standard? You do need standards.
Cody Simms:
I mean it seems like at some point in the short term, it may be hard to compete with local groups or other companies or whatnot who don't have these standards and therefore may be able to, in the short term, do things with less cost. Presumably an organization like Glencore that has the resources to be able to do all of this public transparency work around this can ultimately win on public opinion, demanding of this and policy demanding of this amount of transparency is that-
Kunal Sinha:
You are right. And from our perspective, we take this duty very seriously. We go to these places to extract the metal. We are there. We are trying to leave a very small footprint, work with the communities while we are there. And then when you're done mining, you want to try and restore it as best as possible. That's a license to operate. It's not even a question of how well you do it or not. If you don't do it well, you can't really operate. So we're very proud to be very good at those things. And then I think if you look at IRA, if you look at legislations like foreign entity of concern, if you look at what Europe is doing, so there is a legislative push that does try to achieve some of this by defining what is the FDA compliant country where these things are done at good standards.
So you have that. But also I think OEMs, especially OEMs in the energy transition space, have their own standards. They have their own audits. They will go through and look at these operations, like many of our operations are audited by these OEMs, and they do then satisfy themselves and say, "Yeah, this is a world-class operation and I would like to source from here." Then I won't name them. But many of our sites are mentioned in ESG reports of many of the OEMs because they have to show what you audited. So this whole process of how you verify that a particular site or a particular supplier is operating at a standard that I find acceptable, I think this process will evolve over time, but there has to be this process because you're right. There are many different ways of doing these things. We like to think that we are operating at extremely high standards and we abide by those standards, and we have our own standards.
We have safe work standards, we have environmental standards, sustainable development standards beyond just the commercial aspect of all of this. So I think it'll bifurcate in that way. And at the end of the day, yes, I think there will be a market for metal that's sustainably produced, responsibly produced, and goes to energy transition. And there may certainly be some other form of production which is not that responsible, but I think increasingly that sort of metal may not find its way into the supply chain for these responsible companies and OEMs playing a role in the energy transition.
Cody Simms:
Well, I appreciate you addressing those topics with us as well. They're just as important obviously as the technical topics and the market topics, if not more so. And as we set up at the beginning, it's an industry in transition. This industry maybe didn't pay as much attention to some of those topics 20, 30 years ago. And so bringing them to light today and acknowledging how the world has evolved to appreciate those and basically demand and require them, clearly an incredibly important part of this energy transition story that we're all working through.
Kunal Sinha:
Yeah, a thought I'd leave you with, Cody, is I do think that having spent most of my now working career in a natural resources company and having gone to these sites and mines and whatnot, if you go to one of these sites, people who are working there, and these are people who have been working on these sites for 30, 40 years. Actually, you will realize that what we call ESG now or some of these new taxonomy, in the mining world, if you are a good mining company, especially a listed miner, this was never a question mark or an option or a box to tick. This was a duty of care. So this was a responsibility for the safety of your operators and your employees. So in my mind, any mining company, not just Glencore, any responsible mining company, especially a listed company, I think this was always very serious.
And it was a license to operate, having good community relationships, having a good environmental footprint and doing things right. So I actually think that natural resources companies should have an easy and natural way of being ESG compliant because they always were. Now the standards are developing, evolving. You have to do a bit more. You have to do more reporting and more data that you have to share, but we are not having to... It's not like you get in the room and say, "Oh my God, what does ESG mean and do we do it?" Sort of thing. So I do think the industry perhaps gets a bit of a bad rep from people who may not be from the industry, but if you are from the industry, you'll realize even 30 years ago, people did the best they could to keep people safe, to run things responsibly, to produce things at the best and highest standards possible. So at some point, I do think the industry doesn't get as much appreciation as perhaps it should. So I just have to add that.
Cody Simms:
Sure. Thanks for sharing that. And Kunal, any last thoughts or anything I didn't ask that we should have covered today?
Kunal Sinha:
No, I think we had a very good wide-ranging conversation. We didn't go into a lot of this, but I do think as you fast-forward this story from an energy transition perspective, I go back to it has to be a mix of responsible production and responsible consumption. And I believe that gets into this theme of circularity and circular economy. And when you get into that team, it's a coordination challenge because it's not like you're coordinating within a company or across two companies. You have to coordinate across five industries to get a good circular economy going on. And I think the key to doing that is all about partnerships and collaboration. So we are big on that. We don't claim to know everything. We love to partner with people all the way from crazy ideas, from a startup down to very mature companies with good technology, and everything else in between. So I think the theme going forward is one of circularity driven by collaboration.
Cody Simms:
Well, I appreciate. That's a good theme to end on for sure, and a call to action to many innovators out there who may be listening to this that are working on potential solutions. It sounds like in Glencore you have a company that is looking for new ways of doing things, and so appreciate you joining us and sharing more about your role, Kunal, and also explaining a bit more about how the mining and natural resources space works.
Kunal Sinha:
Thanks, Cody. I really appreciate the opportunity and great to be on the podcast.
Jason Jacobs:
Thanks again for joining us on My Climate Journey podcast.
Cody Simms:
At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity.
Jason Jacobs:
If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us at mcjcollective.com. And if you have a guest suggestion, let us know that via Twitter @MCJpod.
Yin Lu:
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Cody Simms:
Thanks and see you next episode.
PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:03:26]
