On September 23 and 24, the American National Standards Institute will convene a landmark hybrid workshop in Washington, DC, bringing together industry, government, and standards experts to identify gaps and priorities in U.S. critical minerals standardization. The sessions will focus on traceability, circular economy, data handling, and labeling — areas where the United States currently lacks the coherent national framework that the EU has built through its Critical Raw Materials Act. What happens in that room over two days could meaningfully shape the market access rules that producers and manufacturers face for years to come.
Introduction
Standards are easy to overlook until they become a problem. A standard is simply a shared set of rules: how to measure something, how to label it, what information must travel with it through a supply chain. When those rules are missing or inconsistent, transactions become harder, compliance costs rise, and market access for producers can hinge on whether their paperwork matches a buyer's requirements. In critical minerals, the stakes attached to that paperwork are unusually high.
On September 23 and 24, 2026, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) will convene a two-day hybrid workshop in Washington, DC, to confront exactly that problem. Stakeholders from across the critical minerals value chain — miners, processors, manufacturers, federal agencies, and standards bodies — will gather to identify gaps in the U.S. standards landscape and shape the priorities of a national strategy. Deep-dive sessions will cover traceability, circular economy, data handling, and labeling: four areas where the absence of coherent national rules is increasingly felt as a competitive and security liability.
This matters to a wide audience. It matters to producers in countries that supply the United States, because the standards emerging from this process will shape what information they must provide and how it will be verified. It matters to U.S. manufacturers, because access to responsibly sourced minerals increasingly depends on conformity assessment systems that do not yet exist in consistent form. And it matters to policymakers, because the rules written in workshops like this one are the mechanisms through which national strategy actually reaches the ground.
What ANSI Is Doing and Why Now
ANSI is a private non-profit organization that serves as the official U.S. representative to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). It does not write standards itself in most cases; instead, it coordinates the U.S. standardization system, accredits standards developers, and ensures that American positions are coherently represented in international forums. Its membership spans more than 270,000 companies and organizations and 30 million professionals worldwide.
The September workshop is part of a multi-phase initiative ANSI launched formally on April 20, 2026, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Mining and Mineral Production Technologies Office. The initiative includes a standards landscape assessment — a mapping exercise to identify which standards currently exist, which organizations develop them, and where the gaps are — as well as a webinar series, the September workshop, and a summary report. From January to June 2027, a Critical Minerals Standards Council will use those findings to develop a full U.S. Standards Strategy for Critical Minerals.
The June 2026 webinars that preceded the workshop offered a preview of the terrain. Attendees heard from standards and codes developers covering upstream, midstream, and downstream activities, including a dedicated session for U.S. government stakeholders. The picture that emerged was consistent with what independent researchers have also found: existing standards are fragmented, developed largely within individual companies rather than as industry-wide frameworks, and poorly interoperable across borders.
The timing is not coincidental. The second Trump administration has made critical minerals security a top economic and national security priority since January 2025, and Beijing's ability to leverage raw material dependencies in trade negotiations has only sharpened that urgency. The USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 confirmed that the United States is now 100 percent reliant on imports for 13 of the 60 minerals on its updated critical minerals list, including scandium, tantalum, and yttrium, and more than 50 percent reliant on imports for an additional 20. China accounts for over half of U.S. imports of eight minerals, including graphite, rare earths, and antimony.
What the Workshop Will Actually Examine
The four deep-dive topics at the September workshop map directly onto the pressure points in the current supply chain.
Traceability is the starting point. A traceability system is what allows a buyer to verify where a mineral came from, under what conditions it was produced, and who handled it along the way. In practice, traceability today is patchy. A September 2026 OECD study examining lithium supply chains in Argentina and Chile, and nickel supply chains in Indonesia and the Philippines, found that many producing countries are still in the early stages of adoption. The study, which drew on a survey of 90 companies, found that traders show the highest implementation rates while miners, the origin point of the whole system, have the lowest. Current tools are largely company-specific rather than industry-wide, which means the data they generate is not easily shared or compared. Without shared standards for what traceability data must contain and how it must be formatted, the information cannot flow reliably from mine to manufacturer.
The circular economy session addresses a related but distinct challenge. Recycling and recovery of critical minerals is widely recognized as a supply security lever, but it only works if recovered material can be verified and accepted into downstream supply chains with the same confidence as primary material. That requires standards for material characterization, purity verification, and labeling that currently do not exist in consistent form. As I noted in my analysis of the EU Court of Auditors' findings in September 2026, Europe faces exactly this problem: ten strategic materials carry a zero recycling rate, and the implementing acts needed to activate member states' national circularity plans had still not been adopted more than a year past their deadline.
Data handling and labeling round out the agenda. These may sound like administrative details, but they are the infrastructure through which every other standard operates. If two companies use different data formats to record chain-of-custody information, or if a labeling requirement in one jurisdiction does not map onto a requirement in another, the friction that results is real and costly. The G7 Critical Minerals Action Plan, agreed at the Kananaskis Summit in June 2025, specifically underlined the importance of interoperable digital infrastructure across traceability initiatives, precisely because fragmentation multiplies compliance costs without improving outcomes.
The International Stakes: Aligning with the G7 and Competing with EU Rules
The ANSI workshop is not happening in isolation. It is positioned explicitly as a contribution to the G7 Critical Minerals Standards Roadmap, which tasked relevant ministers with advancing standards-based markets and committed G7 leaders to transparency, diversification, and responsible production as foundational principles. ANSI's initiative includes an International Roundtable that will promote its eventual strategy recommendations alongside those G7 commitments to allied national standards bodies.
The European comparison is instructive for understanding what is at stake. The EU's Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), which entered into force in May 2024, sets binding benchmarks for domestic mining, processing, and recycling by 2030, and includes supply chain due diligence requirements aligned with the EU Taxonomy and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. The CRMA relies primarily on regulatory requirements and streamlined permitting rather than subsidies. It creates a framework in which producers who cannot demonstrate responsible sourcing through recognized conformity assessment systems face real market access barriers. The European Commission is expected to publish its first implementation report and progress review in 2026.
The United States does not yet have an equivalent framework. What it has is a rapidly expanding set of bilateral agreements: at the 2026 Critical Minerals Ministerial, the United States signed eleven new bilateral critical minerals frameworks or memoranda of understanding with countries including Argentina, Morocco, Peru, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom. The Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement (FORGE), created as the successor to the Minerals Security Partnership, is designed to spur investment in supply chains outside China. Project Vault, launched in February 2026, established a critical mineral reserve funded by a ten-billion-dollar Export-Import Bank loan and two billion dollars in private investment.
Bilateral agreements and reserves address the supply side. Standards address something different: the rules that determine which supply is trusted, how that trust is verified, and what information must accompany a shipment through a complex international value chain. Without that layer, bilateral agreements can secure access in principle without ensuring quality or provenance in practice. ANSI's response to a USTR request for comments on a proposed plurilateral critical minerals trade agreement made this point directly, urging explicit standards-related provisions in any agreement and offering to support implementation through workshops and private-sector-led delegations.
The Objections and Complications
Voluntary consensus standards processes have genuine strengths: they bring in private sector expertise, build legitimacy through broad participation, and are more flexible than legislation. They also have well-documented weaknesses, and it is worth being clear-eyed about them.
The first concern is speed. Developing a consensus standard typically takes years. The U.S. Standards Strategy for Critical Minerals will not be complete until mid-2027 at the earliest, and the working groups that will actually draft standards will be announced only in late 2026. Meanwhile, China processes over 90 percent of the world's rare earth elements and roughly 80 percent of its lithium, and the supply chain pressures described in my earlier coverage of automotive procurement and the Hormuz crisis are not waiting for standards bodies to reach consensus.
The second concern is participation asymmetry. The stakeholders who show up to standards workshops are typically large companies with the resources to engage in multi-year processes. Smaller producers, particularly those in developing economies that supply the United States under new bilateral frameworks, may not have the capacity to participate meaningfully. If the standards that emerge reflect only the preferences of large downstream manufacturers, they risk becoming barriers to entry that entrench existing sourcing relationships rather than opening them up.
The third concern is interoperability. The OECD's September 2026 traceability report specifically flags the risk that standards developed within individual company systems cannot serve as industry-wide frameworks. The same risk applies at the national level: if U.S. standards diverge from ISO frameworks, from EU requirements under the CRMA, or from the G7 roadmap, compliance costs multiply and producers face fragmented requirements from different buyers in different markets. ANSI's dual role as the U.S. member body at ISO and IEC is meant to mitigate this, but alignment requires active effort and consistent U.S. participation in international working groups, which has historically been uneven.
A fourth practical issue is the verification question. A standard that says what information must be reported is only as useful as the systems available to verify that the information is accurate. The IEA's April 2026 survey on traceability practices identified high implementation costs and limited interoperability between existing systems as key barriers, particularly along complex, geographically concentrated supply chains. Those barriers do not disappear because a standard now requires disclosure; they shift the burden to whoever must audit the disclosure.
What Comes Next
The immediate post-workshop step is a summary report capturing key findings, identified gaps, and recommended next steps. That report will feed into the Standards Strategy development process running from January to June 2027, led by the Critical Minerals Standards Council. A call for working group members will be announced in late 2026, and the next quarterly meeting of the U.S. ISO Critical Minerals Standards Coordination Group is scheduled for December 9, 2026: a virtual meeting that will help align U.S. positions in relevant ISO committees ahead of the strategy drafting phase.
For producers in supplier countries, the practical implication is a window of opportunity. Standards development processes at this stage are genuinely open to shaping. Countries and companies that engage in the ANSI process, or that make their views known through national standards bodies engaged with ISO, have a better chance of ensuring that the eventual requirements are technically achievable and proportionate. Those that wait until conformity assessment requirements appear in purchase contracts will have no influence over their design.
For U.S. manufacturers, the workshop marks the beginning of a process that will eventually produce clarity on what responsible sourcing claims must actually demonstrate and how they will be verified. That clarity carries a cost in compliance and audit infrastructure, but it also reduces the legal and reputational risk of supply chain due diligence done inconsistently.
The broader trajectory is toward convergence between trade policy and standards policy in critical minerals. The United States is simultaneously negotiating bilateral supply agreements, building reserves, seeking a plurilateral trade framework through the USTR process, and now developing national standards through ANSI. Those tracks are most powerful when they reinforce one another: when the bilateral agreements reference the standards, when the plurilateral framework includes conformity assessment provisions, and when the standards themselves align with G7 and ISO frameworks. The September workshop is one node in that larger architecture. Whether the nodes connect coherently will determine whether the architecture holds.