Accounting for Organic Feedstocks in Criticality Conversations

Research into material criticality and associated methodologies has increased in recent years, but organic feedstocks such as petroleum, natural gas, and coal have been a prominent missing component in many of them. In this work, previous studies built around minerals and metals were assessed for applicability to organic feedstocks. Vulnerability to supply restrictions, supply risk, and environmental impacts, the three pillars of modern criticality studies, are expressed with changes to metrics or entirely new metrics. These changes include metrics addressing alternative feedstocks, raw material percentage (from extraction to processing), impacts to the environment, and impacts to humans. Next, this work considers the raw material risks associated with polymer products from a corporate perspective. Determining raw material associated risks provides valuable insights for more sustainable corporate supply chains.