German car manufacturer BMW has closed a deal last week with Chinese Blockchain firm VenChain for a mutual collaboration on Digital Passport for their cars. It didn’t take BMW long to find the next use case for blockchains and jump in another partnership. This time the idea is to source ethical cobalt for its products and they decided to do that hand in hand with a blockchain startup called Circulor. According to Reuters, Douglas Johnson-Poensgen, the CEO of this lesser known UK based startup, Circulor is collaborating with BMW in a pilot project to track legally sourced cobalt supplies.

Cobalt is an essential part of the electric-vehicles batteries that BMW manufactures and since the two thirds of the world’s cobalt supplies are from the Democratic of Congo, where a major part of the cobalt is mined in unregulated artisanal mines mostly by child labor, it is important to monitor the source of the material. Circulor is offering a transaction-recording technology that is already monitoring (mapping) the supply, making sure that BMW purchases only clean cobalt which is mainly coming from places such as Australia and Canada and only some industrial parts of Congo. The firm is loud an clear on their standpoint: “We believe it makes economic sense to start with sources that aren’t a problem” Circulor CEO Douglas Johnson-Poensgen told Reuters in an interview.

They also added: “Once the system is proven and operating at scale, one can tackle the harder use cases like artisanal mines.”

Johnson-Poensgen said it is possible to enter the main stages of the clean cobalt’s journey on to an immutable ledger that uses blockchain technology. With the help of the public information held by the ledger the unclean cobalt could be refused and eventually totally eliminated from the market.