Product Stewardship

Our Approach to Product Stewardship

We are committed to developing an approach to product stewardship with the products we manufacture ensuring sustainability and minimising environmental impact.

As Fortescue develops products our long term ambition is that customers will be able to understand the emissions impact of relevant product through a digital product passports.

Product stewardship is essential to decarbonising value chains, managing climate risks, and meeting growing global expectations for transparency and action on the environmental impacts of products.

Challenges

The term ‘green’ is often used inconsistently across industries and regions, with no universally accepted definitions, standards, or certification frameworks for many of our priority product areas. While the shared aim is to decarbonise and reduce environmental impact across value chains, the way ‘green’ is defined can vary significantly. Fortescue is working with partners to advocate for consistent, credible definitions and the development of harmonised industry standards to support effective decarbonisation.

Collaboration

We work closely with suppliers to strengthen transparency, improve traceability, and drive sustainable outcomes in our supply chain. We prioritise high risk and high-impact areas where focused efforts can deliver meaningful change - such as developing traceability capacity and systems and conducting lifecycle assessments (LCAs). Traceability is a critical enabler for our approach to building sustainable supply chains.

We have learnt that by engaging suppliers early in the sourcing process and clearly communicating our sustainability expectations, we can identify opportunities for collaboration to meet evolving environmental and social standards. This collaborative approach helps us understand and reduce embedded emissions to ensure our products align with regulatory requirements and market expectations.

We collaborate internally to align sustainability objectives with commercial outcomes. Our Contracts and Procurement team work closely with our Sustainability team to regularly assess our supply chain risks, key categories/suppliers and material inputs to determine our strategic priorities. This year, we introduced circularity and product stewardship criteria into our Sustainable Supply Chain Toolkit for key categories to further integrate into our sourcing decisions.

Fortescue’s product stewardship approach spans our metals operations in the Pilbara and our growth and energy activities.

Decarbonisation is a core focus, and we are working to reduce emissions across the entire product lifecycle by embedding sustainability into design, sourcing, and traceability practices. As we expand into manufacturing low emission technologies, such as battery systems and zero-emission mining equipment, we are committed to building transparent and responsible value chains that align with our long-term environmental and social objectives.

Stewardship for our magnetite and hematite products is currently focused on decarbonisation across Scopes 1, 2 and 3. Decarbonising our direct operations is the first step.

The majority of Fortescue's emissions are related to the processing of our sold iron ore products in downstream steel-making. Fortescue's work to support decarbonisation of this process, (incorporating the processing of iron ore into iron, as well as the further processing of iron into steel), involves green steel innovation as well as collaboration with our customers and the broader steelmaking industry.

For more information on our approach across Scopes 1, 2, and 3 please see Climate Transition Plan 2024 in our Document Library.

Risks and Opportunities

We identify and assess product stewardship risks and opportunities through a combination of LCAs, supply chain due diligence and supplier engagement, and regulatory monitoring. Our Sustainability and Contracts and Procurement teams collaborate to integrate sustainability into sourcing. We also monitor emerging standards and definitions of 'green' to drive alignment with evolving expectations and regulatory frameworks.

Product stewardship is a proactive approach to managing the environmental, social and economic impacts of our products throughout their lifecycle – from design and sourcing to use and end of life. It reflects our commitment to reducing harm and creating value across our value chain.