Traceability has become a central interface between trade facilitation and environmental performance. Traceability is an evolving concept – expanding from traditional origin tracking to increasingly multidimensional information needs along supply chains, including environmental aspects. In the context of efficient and non-discriminatory border processes, trade facilitation measures play an enabling role in supporting competitive supply chains to meet environmental objectives and operate efficiently across borders.
Applying a product environmental lifecycle perspective offers an innovative analytical lens to the role of trade facilitation in enabling competitive supply chains that can support environmental objectives. Assessing the production, use and end-of-life segments separately helps identify where trade facilitation arrangements are already aligned with implementation of environmental objectives and where challenges are most acute. In this context, core trade facilitation tools – such as transparency provisions, digitalised procedures, risk management systems, and inter-agency co-operation – can provide a practical entry point for implementing environmental objectives.
Environment-related Trade Facilitation Indicators (TFIs) provide a structured framework for analysis. Mapping environment-related practices across transparency, documents, basic automation, procedures and border agency co-operation enables a systematic assessment of how environmental requirements are operationalised at the border. Environment-related TFIs, building on the recognised metrics of the OECD TFIs, thus offer a quantitative tool for measuring the proportion of trade facilitation efforts that support stronger environmental performance in supply chains and environment-related traceability efforts.
Trade facilitation systems in OECD economies cover just over half (55%) of the border-related challenges linked to the environmental lifecycle of traded products. Readiness is strongest for production, use, reuse and remanufacturing, where requirements are more often aligned with existing customs and regulatory processes. Progress is most visible in information availability, basic automation and the streamlining of formalities. In turn, more technical areas, such as appeals, fees and charges, and consultation mechanisms, remain less developed.
Integration in trade facilitation systems remains weakest for waste- and scrap- (recyclable materials) related flows: efforts are roughly twice as visible in production, use, reuse and remanufacturing as in waste treatment and disposal. This reflects the greater complexity of cross-border waste and recyclable materials movements, which often involve more authorities, higher risk sensitivity and less harmonised procedures, making them harder to embed in trade facilitation systems.
Enhanced transparency emerges as a cross-cutting priority. Transparency has improved, but information is often dispersed across customs, environmental and sectoral authorities, limiting end-to-end usability for traders. Clear and accessible information on related requirements is essential to improve understanding of emerging environment-related measures in trade contexts, enhance predictability for businesses and other stakeholders, and support co-operation across diverse policy approaches.
Co‑ordination is a recurring bottleneck, mirroring broader challenges for trade facilitation frameworks: Environment-related traceability at the border is inherently multi-actor and system-dependent, spanning classification, regulatory requirements, data movement, and risk management. Yet single-entry approaches, interoperable systems, and routine domestic and cross-border data access remain uneven, with pressing constraints on the institutional side.
Expansion of the OECD Trade Facilitation Indicators in the area of environment
A trade facilitation lens on product environmental lifecycles
