Governments want to know where every tonne of steel and sack of coffee comes from, but their customs posts are still working out where to put the answer. On January 1 the European Union’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) stopped being a reporting exercise and started running up bills. Anyone importing more than 50 tonnes a year of steel, aluminium, cement, fertiliser, electricity or hydrogen now has to be an authorised declarant, with the emissions embedded in each shipment logged against a customs code. By January 7, according to a Commission update , more than 12,000 operators had applied for that status and some 4,100 had actually received it. Jessika Roswall, the EU’s environment commissioner, had a rougher time with the other big traceability law on the books. In September 2025 she asked for the deforestation regulation (EUDR) to be postponed for a second time, on the grounds that the IT system meant to receive companies’ due-diligence statements (plot-by-plot ...