EUDR screening for natural rubber importers.
Natural rubber has no FSC or RSPO-style certificate directory, and plot-level origin data is typically gone by the time rubber leaves the mill. Here's how EUDR applies to a rubber importer, and what a satellite screen can still tell you once you do have a coordinate.
What counts as rubber under EUDR
Annex I's rubber entry covers raw natural rubber and latex, and separately lists a wide range of finished goods: vulcanised rubber thread and cord, conveyor and transmission belts, tyres, inner tubes, rubber apparel such as gloves, and other hard rubber articles. A finished-goods manufacturer can be in scope in its own right, but only if it's genuinely importing raw or lightly processed natural rubber directly, not buying an already-compounded material from a domestic trader.
- Importing raw natural rubber or latex directly from a grower, dealer, or exporter at origin makes you the operator: full geolocation, risk assessment, and a Due Diligence Statement per shipment.
- Buying pre-processed rubber compound, or a finished good made from rubber that already cleared EU customs, is the lighter downstream-operator path.
- Whether a given rubber trading house buys from growers/plantations at origin, or from another EU-based trader, is often genuinely unclear from its own marketing copy alone. That's worth confirming directly before assuming either role.
Rubber is the least visible Annex I commodity, and origin data usually doesn't survive the mill
Roughly 85% of natural rubber comes from an estimated 6 million smallholders, moving through four or five intermediary tiers before it reaches an EU buyer: smallholder, village collector, local dealer, mill, then exporter. By the time rubber leaves a mill, its plot-level origin data is typically gone entirely, not just incomplete.
This project's own market research found no EU trade association or certification-holder directory for natural rubber comparable to FSC or PEFC for timber, or RSPO for palm oil. Existing EUDR compliance vendors do claim to cover rubber, and at least one vendor sells rubber-specific tooling, so it isn't a total vendor vacuum. Their own material confirms the same root problem: most rubber exporters source from thousands of smallholder farmers where paper records are the norm and GPS coordinates simply don't exist yet.
This is an origin-side data-collection problem, not something any EU-side screening tool can manufacture from nothing. Screening checks the coordinates you actually have. If your supplier can't yet give you a real plot location, no satellite check, from us or anyone else, changes that.
What a rubber screening actually shows
Upload your plantation, dealer, or mill-relationship list with coordinates (or names and addresses if that's what you have) and every location is checked for forest-cover change signals since 31 December 2020.
If your rubber supply chain has no traceable plot at all yet, that's exactly what CANNOT SCREEN is for: an honest data gap, distinct from a satellite result, rather than a silently skipped row.
Rubber trees naturally shed canopy, and coarse baselines can misread that
Rubber trees go through a natural seasonal defoliation cycle, sometimes called wintering, where the canopy visibly thins and regrows each year. A coarse forest-cover baseline reading that cycle at the wrong moment could misread it as loss, the same category of risk as agroforestry canopy structure in coffee and cocoa.
Extending our ground-truth validation suite to this kind of cyclical-vegetation false positive is on our roadmap; we don't yet have a confirmed rubber example either way. Treat a RED result on a known rubber plantation as a prompt to check the before/after imagery and the time of year, not as a settled answer.
Screen your rubber suppliers
Send us your plantation or mill-relationship list and get a RED/AMBER/GREEN read back the same day, with before/after imagery for every screenable location. It supports your own Article 10/11 due diligence; it isn't a substitute for it and isn't a Due Diligence Statement.