IN Brief:
- More than 80% of CATL product lifecycle emissions are attributed to its supply chain.
- Planned Green Procurement Guidelines will add carbon footprints, renewable electricity, and energy efficiency to supplier assessment.
- Suppliers with stronger low-carbon performance may gain order priority and longer-term agreements under comparable commercial conditions.
CATL is incorporating carbon performance into supplier qualification, annual reviews, and purchasing decisions as it shifts the focus of its decarbonisation programme beyond its own factories. The battery manufacturer plans to require product carbon-footprint data from new suppliers and to assess renewable electricity use and energy efficiency as part of supplier management.
The procurement measures form part of CATL’s target to achieve carbon neutrality across its value chain by 2035. The company says all 20 of its battery plants have now achieved carbon-neutral certification, completing the core-operations target it set for 2025 and leaving the much larger upstream emissions base as the next stage of the programme.
More than 80% of lifecycle carbon emissions associated with CATL products come from the supply chain, according to the company, while total supply chain emissions are more than five times those generated by its core operations. That difference shifts the centre of the carbon programme towards mining, refining, battery materials, components, energy purchasing, logistics, and recycling.
The planned Green Procurement Guidelines will formalise part of that pressure. Product carbon-footprint data will be incorporated into supplier qualification, while renewable-energy use and energy consumption per unit of output will feature in ongoing reviews. Under comparable commercial conditions, suppliers with stronger low-carbon performance may receive priority in order allocation and support through longer-term agreements.
Attaching purchasing consequences to emissions performance changes the status of carbon information inside the supplier relationship. Data that might previously have sat mainly in ESG reporting begins to influence access to orders, placing it alongside price, quality, capacity, delivery, and technical performance in the commercial assessment.
CATL has been building the data infrastructure needed to support that approach. Its Carbon Chain Management System dates from 2022, and the company says it has calculated real-world carbon data for more than 100 core Tier 1 suppliers while creating more than 1,000 product and raw-material models.
The scale of the battery supply chain makes consistency difficult. A cathode or anode material supplier may itself depend on miners, refiners, chemical processors, transport providers, and energy suppliers, meaning the reported footprint at Tier 1 can rely on information generated several stages upstream. Comparable supplier scores therefore depend on common calculation boundaries, credible source data, and controls against estimates being treated as measurements.
CATL’s procurement centre intends to widen those requirements rather than relying only on a small group of strategic suppliers. The company has set an objective of expanding carbon-data coverage across its core supplier base and is launching a Zero-Carbon Supply Chain Empowerment Initiative with an initial group of 30 suppliers.
The programme covers material and process innovation, manufacturing, green logistics, and battery recycling. Those areas expose different sources of emissions: electricity-intensive refining and material production, plant energy consumption, freight movement, and the treatment of batteries and valuable minerals at end of life.
Renewable electricity is likely to become one of the more visible supplier metrics because energy source can materially change the carbon footprint of energy-intensive battery materials. CATL says zero-carbon electricity accounted for all power consumption across its core operations in 2025, and its value-chain strategy now asks suppliers to demonstrate progress on the same issue.
Regulation is increasing the value of that evidence independently of CATL’s own targets. The company has already obtained Chinese product carbon-footprint certification for an energy-storage product and has highlighted forthcoming carbon-footprint disclosure requirements under the European Union’s battery regulation. Suppliers therefore face overlapping demands from customers, regulators, and product-market access rather than one voluntary corporate programme.
The order-allocation element is the most direct commercial lever. Long-term agreements or preferred allocation can give suppliers greater certainty when deciding whether to invest in renewable electricity, efficiency measures, or lower-carbon processes. Conversely, companies unable to provide robust data may find their competitive position weakening even where their conventional cost and quality metrics remain acceptable.
There is a practical risk that data requirements hit smaller suppliers hardest. Product-level carbon accounting requires systems, expertise, and access to upstream information that may not be evenly available across the supplier base. If procurement criteria become more demanding faster than measurement capability develops, buyers can end up comparing datasets built on different assumptions.
CATL’s own purchasing decisions will determine how quickly the policy affects behaviour. The company has already completed the easier part of its original timetable by certifying its factories; the 2035 target extends through a far more fragmented network. Once carbon performance begins influencing who wins orders and for how long, emissions data becomes part of the supplier’s commercial offer rather than an attachment to the sustainability report.
