Under the Hood: Accelerating Change Through Responsible Procurement: Insights from AUDI AG

What does your ASI membership mean to you? Why does it matter?

Our membership provides an important external benchmark that helps us understand where we stand today in terms of sustainable aluminium and where we can continue to improve. It gives us a credible framework we can rely on, both internally and across our supply chain.

The membership also allows us to engage directly in shaping the future of responsible aluminium through participation in the Standards Committee and Working Groups. This involvement is important to us: it ensures that we are not only users of the standard, but active contributors to its development.

Having ASI Performance Standard (PS) Certification demonstrates our stewardship of aluminium and shows that we are committed to the same principles we expect of our suppliers. We carry the same responsibilities, apply the same requirements, and aim to practice what we preach. This credibility enables us to communicate clearly—both externally and within our group—that there is a trusted, recognised standard for aluminium in ASI.

Our Chain of Custody (CoC) Certification supports our annual quantity measurements, while the combined PS and CoC Certification of our suppliers plays a key role in providing our procurement teams with assurance of responsible ESG practices along our value chain. The combined sustainability certifications also act as a risk mitigation tool within our supply chain, all the way back to the mine.

However, every standards system has areas of improvement and must continue to evolve. Improvements in terms of transparency, traceability and quality strengthen ASI’s position in the global supply chain. We believe progress depends on staying engaged, taking responsibility, and continuing to push for ambitious, credible standards. That is why ASI’s credibility matters so much to us, and why we actively encourage more brands within our group to join and contribute to strengthening the system together.

What improvements or changes have you made to align with, support, or implement the ASI standards?

We were already operating at a high level of maturity when we began our first certifications, nevertheless the process required us to further formalise existing practices. Starting from a strong baseline meant that certification was less about major changes and more about refining and documenting what we were already doing. The external perspective provided through certification was valuable to us, offering an independent view that helped identify a small number of improvement areas, particularly related to health and safety. It also reinforced how advanced our approach is compared with peers, especially in relation to closed-loop material use.

One major improvement has been the introduction of Chain of Custody (CoC) requirements. Since 2020, CoC Certification has been a mandatory requirement for all our flat sheet suppliers. We are now working to extend this requirement to additional material categories, including in-house castings, battery housings and alloy wheels, with a particular focus on primary alloys and heavy components. That said, we recognise the “chicken-and-egg” challenge in this process: CoC requirements can only be mandated where there is sufficient choice in the supplier market, but suppliers will prefer to certify only where it has been mandated. To address this, we are actively engaging with suppliers to communicate the importance and underlying rationale of certification and are developing a phased roll-out plan to encourage wider uptake.

Certification has also supported significant progress in our closed-loop practices. Since 2017, we have continuously rolled out the Aluminium Closed Loop process on all our relevant press shops over the years. In this process, our internal press-shop scrap has been managed in a closed loop with our flat sheet suppliers. Because our suppliers are CoC certified, we are able to return CoC-certified scrap back into the supply chain, increasing the share of certified material without reliance on virgin materials from the mine. By closing material loops and adapting our processes, we have been able to increase the overall volume of CoC-certified material.

In parallel, we are working on improving our internal systems by automating the tracking and tracing of material mass flows across the business. This allows us to manage scrap streams more precisely and steer materials more effectively back into closed-loop and certified pathways.

Looking ahead, a key priority will be expanding our demand for ASI Chain of Custody (CoC) certified material across additional material categories. By doing so, we aim to mitigate the human rights risks along our supply chain and further support the transformation of the sector by creating sustained demand for ASI material and encouraging wider uptake throughout the supply chain.

We also see continued engagement in ASI Working Groups and the Standards Committee as essential. There is room to further strengthen the ASI Standards, and maintaining the credibility of ASI is critical. To remain effective, Standards must keep pace with evolving regulatory and legislative requirements. Our active participation in these multi-stakeholder settings will help ensure that the Standards remain robust, practical and aligned with the real-world challenges we face.

We strongly value ASI’s multi-stakeholder approach, in which the perspectives of civil society, rights holders, and both upstream and downstream industry participants help to shape the Standards. We recognise that priorities can differ significantly across these groups, and that what matters most to one set of stakeholders may not align with the priorities of others. The Standards Committee and Working Group processes are therefore designed to balance these differing perspectives, build consensus and reflect them, as appropriate, in final decisions. The challenge—and the opportunity—is to find solutions that work across the entire value chain. While this is not always straightforward, we see it as our role to challenge performance levels, raise the bar and act as a catalyst for change. In doing so, we help translate emerging customer expectations and legislative requirements into practical, achievable solutions for the sector.

More broadly, ASI provides an efficient and collaborative framework for addressing shared risks and strengthening supply chain assurance via sustainability transparency. It establishes a common understanding of what responsible business looks like across the industry. As the automotive sector faces increasing scrutiny around human rights and other sustainability risks, we need credible, scalable ways to respond. Given the complexity of modern supply chains—and the reality that no single company can fully oversee every supplier tier down to mine level—ASI offers a practical and effective mechanism to address these challenges collectively.

responsibility.

Read more about Audi AG & Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG

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Learn more about Audi AG & Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG