185 employees who oversee local and regional sourcing and supplier arrangements. Other key factors that increase the complexity of the Company’s efforts to gather information from within the supply chain include the following:
•A significant portion of the Company’s suppliers are located in Asia, and many of these suppliers may not yet have management systems to address the implications of the CMR Regulations. In addition, relatively few of the Company’s suppliers are registrants with the SEC. As a result, the Company provided suppliers with support in order to develop their understanding of the CMR Regulations.
•As noted above, due to the nature of the Company’s products and manufacturing processes, the Company’s direct suppliers tend to be several levels removed from the smelters processing minerals that may be present in the products manufactured or contracted to be manufactured by the Company. This necessitates a significant portion of the Company’s suppliers to engage in their own extensive due diligence efforts in order to provide information requested by the Company.
•In some instances, the Company may be the only entity requesting Conflict Minerals information from a supplier. In these cases, despite the Company’s efforts, the supplier may view responding to the Company’s requests as a lower priority, and as a result the supplier may take additional time to provide the Company with the information needed in connection with its Conflict Minerals compliance efforts. In some cases, the supplier may not respond at all despite repeated requests from the Company to do so.
•To the extent products and component parts are manufactured by third parties, the Company must place additional reliance on those third- party manufacturers to assist the Company in the collection of the information necessary to comply with the due diligence and disclosure requirements under the CMR Regulations. Such third-party manufacturers, which are also typically located in Asia, may lack the infrastructure, resources and knowledge to facilitate a Conflict Minerals compliance effort and may require additional assistance from the Company and/or others in order to do so. In some cases, third-party manufacturers may assert that such information is proprietary.
The factors described above, and resulting complexities, have increased the difficulty of the Company’s efforts to identify the existence, and potential sources of, Conflict Minerals in its products. Regardless of these challenges, the Company diligently worked with its suppliers and third-party manufacturers to collect the information necessary to support its compliance program and this Report.
Conflict Minerals Policy
The Company has adopted a Conflict Minerals policy which is publicly available on its website at https://www.newellbrands.com/conflict-minerals-policies.
2.Reasonable Country of Origin Inquiry
This Section describes the Company’s Reasonable Country of Origin Inquiry (“RCOI”) for Conflict Minerals as required by Item 1.01 of Form
SD.
Section 1 above provides a description of the types of products sold by the Company during the period covered by this Report. As a preliminary
step to the Company’s RCOI, the Company assessed which of these products contain Conflict Minerals, and which products containing Conflict Minerals fall within the scope of the Rule and would thus be included in the RCOI (the “Scoping Assessment”). The Company conducted detailed analyses of its products’ bills of materials and other available information on product composition to determine the Conflict Minerals content of its products. As a result of the Scoping Assessment, the Company determined that some of its products in the “Description of primary products” categories set forth in the table above contain Conflict Minerals.
The Company then worked to link the Conflict Minerals components of the covered products to the suppliers of those components in order to identify suppliers that should be included in the RCOI process. For 2024, direct suppliers that posed a reasonable risk of having provided materials, components or products which may contain Conflict Minerals were covered. The Conflict Minerals Policy includes the Company’s expectation that its suppliers provide information related to country of origin of their products.
In 2024, the Company used a third-party firm to conduct a survey of the Company’s Targeted Suppliers (as defined below) using a Conflict Minerals Reporting Tool (the “CMRT”) to facilitate the RCOI. The CMRT was based on the Responsible Minerals Initiative Reporting Template Version 6.2.
For the year ended December 31, 2024, the Company’s third-party firm surveyed 248 suppliers believed or known to have provided materials, components or products which may contain Conflict Minerals (the “Targeted Suppliers”). Based on our survey, 228 of such Targeted Suppliers, or approximately 92%, submitted a complete response to the CMRT. If a Targeted Supplier did not provide a response to the CMRT, follow up requests were sent to individual Targeted Suppliers pursuant to an escalation process. Completed Targeted Supplier responses were reviewed for completeness and internal consistency. Overall, responses were assigned a rating of low, medium, or high risk based on the contents and completeness of the response as well as the likelihood the Targeted Supplier may be sourcing from the Covered Countries. As a result of the Company’s RCOI, the Company has reason to believe that some Targeted Suppliers in its supply chain of in-scope products or components of such products may be sourcing Conflict Minerals from Covered Countries. However, for the period covered by this Form SD and Report, the Company was unable to determine the specific source of the Conflict Minerals due to insufficient information. Accordingly, the Company undertook the due diligence process described below.
3.Design of Due Diligence Framework
The Company’s due diligence framework is based upon the OECD Framework and the Responsible Minerals Initiative standard for assessing risk.