25SeptCarbon emissions for imported goods: What you need to know
CBAM is moving from policy discussion to practical implementation.
If your organisation imports goods covered by the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, understanding the requirements, data and responsibilities involved is becoming increasingly important.
Join the International Trade Institute for a 60-minute practical webinar with CBAM expert Margarida Meleiro from Carbon Complete.
We’ll look at:
The session ended; the conversation didn't. Follow-up questions welcome.
Metal lands here, sits in the free zone, gets consolidated, leaves again on my bill of lading. The country on that document did not run the furnace, and the mill sits two contracts upstream of the EU buyer.
The registry route assumes the mill and the importer know each other. In a re-export chain they do not, and neither side will name the other.
So what does the importer declare? Defaults every time, or can the furnace data travel down a chain built to keep the parties apart?
A bonded lot leaves my floor in parts, months apart, each part entered for free circulation by whoever bought it. The tonnage counts against his year, not my lot. Who sees he has crossed the threshold before I release the next part?
A buyer in Germany sent me a questionnaire in the spring asking for a carbon figure on our knitted cotton, and the covering note said it was for their border obligations. It was not, which took an afternoon to establish. Home textiles are nowhere near the six sectors, and the extension proposed last December runs along steel and aluminium content, which is not us either.
What I cannot settle is the other direction. I sell from inside a customs union, which people keep hearing as a free trade agreement, and here neither shelters anybody, because this is not a customs duty. Our own regulation entered into force at the end of August, and what decides whether our dyehouse falls inside it is the rating of a boiler rather than a code on an invoice, while power generation is among the benchmarked sectors, so a price arrives at my meter either way.
So, plainly: for a seller this mechanism does not cover and will not cover, is any of it reaching me from the European side, or is my exposure entirely a domestic matter now? I would rather know which desk to watch than wait for a letter.
Thank you for opening this, and my apologies for coming to it late.
Most of what leaves my counter for Europe is steel and aluminium, so the emissions figure sits in my clients' purchase orders, not on anything I file. My question is about the year already gone: the monitoring period is the whole calendar year, yet verifiers were accredited only late in it. When one stands in a plant and is asked to attest to January, before anyone there knew what the standard required, does the whole year fall to default values, or can a verifier sign for the months that were kept properly?
I hope the session goes well.
