Critical materials: a systematic literature review

Commodity crises such as the cobalt crisis in 1978, the Rare Earth crisis in 2007 and the aluminum crisis in 2021 are the result of a global imbalance between supply and demand. The root causes of these crises are to be found in the value chain, going back to the raw materials and their transformation cycle. Their consequences are major because supply disruptions generate an inability for companies to meet demand, regardless of the actor in the supply chain that we are looking at. This paper proposes a systematic literature review to understand the extent to which the emerging field of materials criticality falls within the scope of supply chain management. Material criticality is a multidisciplinary research area that proposes a new approach to capture the uncertainties within value chains that disturb supply flows. Taking into account criticality is essential in order to improve visibility within supply chains by tracing the raw materials needed to design and manufacture a product. Considering material criticality characteristics also contributes to improve supply chain resilience. Indeed, the assessment of geological, economic, geopolitical aspects of raw materials across the value chain helps providing warning signals about future disruptions. In this paper, we performed a systematic literature review about critical materials. Our methodology gathered 189 papers that cover theoretical and empirical studies. A deep analysis of the papers allows us to structure this emerging field of research through four categories: conceptual aspects, methodological aspects, mitigation aspects and influencers. This article also presents a descriptive analysis of the corpus and profiles the contributing research communities. We highlight scientific progresses and gaps relevant for each discipline. The results of this paper are a first attempt to establish a link between this emerging field of research to the supply chain management community, which has represented only 11% of the contributions up to now. The research perspectives show a significant potential to integrate critical materials assessment to supply chain risk management practices.