I-REC standards, government alignment key to scaling sustainable supply chains, foundation says

Building globally interoperable attribute tracking standards while respecting national policy frameworks are the twin pillars needed to scale environmental certificate markets and unlock sustainable supply chains, executives from the I-TRACK Foundation said at I-REC Day Japan in Tokyo Oct. 16.

Jared Braslawsky, executive director, and Roble Rosenheim, director of Global Partnerships and APAC regional director, approached the challenge from complementary angles — standards architecture and market activation, respectively — but converged on a consistent message: the infrastructure for verified sustainability claims must be built on facts, trust and government alignment if it is to function credibly across borders.

Common language, built on facts

A central theme across both presentations was the role of attribute certification as a universal translation tool — converting national sustainability frameworks into a language that international supply chains can understand and rely upon.

Braslawsky described the I-TRACK Foundation's standards not as prescriptive rulebooks but as a shared factual infrastructure.

"We say the facts and let government stakeholders decide what's good for their national interest," he said. The foundation's role is to establish what can be proven and verified, while leaving definitional and policy judgments to national authorities.

Rosenheim reinforced this principle from a market development perspective, emphasizing that the foundation's approach is always complementary to domestic market structures.

"We are never competing with domestic actors or their preferences," he said. "We build to facilitate domestic preferences."

The foundation is developing a number of standards under this framework, including a Fuel Passport Standard, a Chain of Custody Standard, a Carbon Standard, a Residual Mix Standard and a Cross-Border Electricity Trade Standard, among others.

Braslawsky said the goal is to provide a basis for everyone to communicate in the same language while allowing individual industries and companies with deep domain expertise to build their own standards on that foundation. He cited green aluminum as an example: producers in that sector can develop their own standard using the foundation's framework without waiting for a global agreement that may never materialize.

From estimates to verified claims

Both speakers pointed to the growing inadequacy of estimate-based sustainability reporting and the need for verified, traceable data. Braslawsky said life cycle assessments built on database averages must give way to attribute-based accounting based on real transaction data.

"We are moving LCA from estimates to facts," he said. The result, he said, will be a more credible and defensible basis for sustainability claims — one based on facts rather than assumptions.

Rosenheim applied the same logic to market activation: a stated desire to claim renewable energy is not meaningful unless backed by a verified energy attribute certificate. Demand alone, he said, is not sufficient — the claim must be substantiated.

Rosenheim's remarks underscore the growing importance of cross-border REC market development in Southeast Asia, driven in large part by the global procurement obligations of Japanese companies. As supply chain sustainability requirements tighten and Science Based Targets initiative commitments expand, the demand for internationally recognized, government-aligned attribute certificates is expected to grow.