Blockchain for Sustainability Weekly
Volume 24 | 11-Sep-22 | 14 Projects
This week we have added 14 new ‘blockchain for sustainability’ projects to our platform which now has ~400 projects. We have also provided an update on one project covered earlier.1
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ESG Reporting
Capturing Scope 3 emissions on blockchain | Japan
Project Description: While many eco-conscious companies are trying to curtail their Scope 1 and 2 emissions (direct emissions from their operations and emissions tied to purchased energy usage) in recent years, curtailing Scope 3 emissions pose a challenge due to being generated across an organization's supply chains. In addition to this, the lack of a secure data-sharing platform disallows companies to share their emissions data. To address this, XELS is launching a blockchain-based platform where companies can create customizable online reports. These reports can be viewed, edited, and shared by both clients and business partners, allowing the company to capture its Scope 3 emissions. The platform will offer a carbon offset education portal, a CO2 emissions calculator, an open venue for reporting ESG targets, and a transparent offset publishing platform that shows an organization's carbon credit purchase and retirement history on an immutable public ledger. In addition to the reporting platform, clients will also have access to the latest generation of XELS' tokenized carbon offset marketplace, where XELS utility tokens can be staked to mint custom carbon offset NFTs that represent corporate climate disclosures and real-world carbon offsets. While all these services would be issued on a blockchain-based platform, the data generated from these services would also be stored on the blockchain. This would ensure data integrity and immutability, allowing companies to openly share this data with relevant stakeholders. In addition to this, XELS also utilizes satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to visualize and quantify actual carbon sequestration.
Expected Benefits:
This project would encourage companies to report their carbon emission data, offering a secure way of storing it.
Blockchain would ensure that the data would remain tamper-proof and accurate, eliminating any threat of greenwashing.
Transparent data capturing would encourage companies to incorporate eco-friendly initiatives.
More Information: NBC 12 and Crypto News
Securely reporting ESG credentials through blockchain | Hong Kong
Project Description: Due to the recent surge in responsible investors and ESG activists, companies are forced to report their ESG performance to remain investor friendly. However, manual ESG data tracking and recording lack data traceability, transparency, and dilute confidence in ESG credentials. This can prevent companies from reaching their sustainability goals in a timely fashion. To address this, Amazon Web Services and InnoBlock teamed up to develop TT Green to help organizations accurately understand the environmental impact of their IT infrastructure. TT Green collects third-party data via Internet of Things (IoT) sensors embedded into devices like electricity meters, which are located on the edge of the network. TT Green then sends the data to its blockchain network. TT Green then helps users automatically transmit and integrate the data in the cloud. InnoBlock also developed a greenhouse gas calculator based on the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidelines. The calculator allows organizations using TT Green to quantify and track emissions quickly and accurately against sustainability goals based on the immutable ESG data stored in the blockchain network. Blockchain keeps the data secure and safe from third-party intrusions, by making the data tamper-proof.
Expected Benefits:
Companies can take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, comply with global standards, and obtain credible green certifications and green financing once they have access to their ESG data.
A transparent ESG data collection process reduces the risk of greenwashing, ensuring data integrity.
Blockchain would ensure that the company can safely share this data with relevant stakeholders.
More Information: AWS
Responsible Supply Chain
Tracing nutrient supplements through blockchain | Liechtenstein and India
Project Description: Considering the number of stakeholders involved in the supply chain, traceability is crucial to ensure visibility and transparency and to build a credible product. However, it becomes difficult for companies to track every element of their supply chain, which can hamper product quality and consumer health if the product is related to the healthcare industry. CannSol, a nutrient supplements company is partnering with TraceX to implement a blockchain-based supply chain traceability solution in their operations. The raw materials such as turmeric and ashwagandha are sourced from India and subsequent steps such as encapsulation, solubilization, and packing are completed by various supply chain players at Liechtenstein. The company would record end-to-end product movement throughout the supply chain on the blockchain. Blockchain would create a digital twin of the product, mimicking its movement, which would enable CannSol to track each product in real time. By using this solution, each raw material and each final product are labeled with a QR code from the system. This would enable the consumer to view a customized interface where they can trace the most important information about the product and its ingredients. The consumer would not worry about the integrity of the data as blockchain would ensure data immutability and data security.
Expected Benefits:
CannSol will have all the stakeholders on a common platform, thereby providing trust and transparency to all.
By showcasing a transparent supply chain, CannSol can command a premium on its products.
Blockchain would ensure that the company eliminates any non-consumable product, ensuring consumer health and well-being.
More Information: Chemical Industry Digest and Healthworld
Ensuring sustainable wool farming through blockchain | United States
Project Description: Lack of transparency in the supply chain is a major challenge for the wool industry, which can lead to inefficient and unsustainable farming practices. According to a report by Collective Fashion Justice and the Center for Biological Diversity, the average climate cost for sheep’s wool is 5 times greater than conventionally grown cotton, and wool uses 367 times more land per bale (metric unit of textile weight) than cotton. However, it is difficult for companies to keep track of every farmer and make them report their produce. Chargeurs Wool USA is piloting a blockchain-based supply chain traceability solution with Shaniko Wool Company in the US. Chargeurs launched NATIVA Regenerative Agriculture Program (NATIVA Regen) to help farmers improve soil and water quality and protect biodiversity, in addition to helping brands reduce their carbon footprint. Brands that create garments with wool produced under the NATIVA Regen program will be committing to supporting regenerative farming practices and farmers and communities. Brands and farmers participating in the program will be able to claim a double NATIVA/Responsible Wool Standard (RWS) certification that guarantees sustainable practices from farm to finished garment. Backed by blockchain technology, the certification proves brands’ commitment to transparency. Chargeurs’s NATIVA wool is low-carbon wool tracked using a blockchain network. Similarly, wool farming would be tracked using the blockchain network to ensure that farmers are using sustainable measures and conserving biodiversity.
Expected Benefits:
A transparent supply chain would enable the company to track each farmer's farming methods, encouraging them to incorporate sustainable farming.
Blockchain would allow the company to command a premium on its product.
Blockchain would consolidate all the scattered farmers and other stakeholders onto a single platform, ensuring effective decision-making.
More Information: Businesswire and Collective Fashion Justice
Making supply chain traceability carbon neutral | Global
Project Description: Supply chain traceability plays a crucial role for any business dealing with physical products. Blockchain provides an option for companies to track and trace their supply chains. However, the energy consumption of blockchain networks raises a question mark in this use case. To address this, Wholechain is partnering with Algorand to transfer its existing operations and solution to Algorand’s carbon-negative blockchain network. Wholechain enables businesses to trace products to their origin, have visibility into every step along the way, and verify claims made about those products. While all these services are used by the company, their data is stored on the blockchain network. In partnership with Algorand, Wholechain would be providing all these services while being carbon neutral. Wholechain’s team would be transitioning their existing customers into Algorand’s blockchain network.
Expected Benefits:
An energy-efficient blockchain would encourage the wider use of this technology.
A transparent supply chain would enable the company to access critical supply chain data and improve management efficiency.
More Information: PR Newswire
GHG Emissions
Update: Creduce lists carbon offsetting token Kichee | India
In the first week of May, we covered a carbon credit tokenization project developed by Creduce, in which the company announced a blockchain-based token for carbon offsetting purposes, named Kichee. Last week this token went live on Polygon Swap, with 10 million tokens issued overall. The launch price of the token was $0.90 and 40 institutional buyers had shown interest in the launch, according to Financial Express. The token saw a positive response from the investor as the price of the token is at $1.2 as of 13 September 2022, according to Kichee's website. This token helps in bridging the gap between impact investors or project backers and sustainability initiatives.
Source: Financial Express and Kichee
Blockchain driving wider EV adoption | United States
Project Description: Using Electric Vehicles (EVs) is a great way to curtail carbon emissions from a personal vehicle. However, the high price of EVs discourages potential buyers to purchase this vehicle, creating a hindrance to its wider adoption. A sustainable measure would be to incentivize EV owners. To do so, C+Charge, a crypto-electric vehicle (EV) charging network has entered into a partnership agreement with Flowcarbon to provide on-chain carbon credits through its goddess nature token (GNT) utility token. The partnership will allow C+Charge to provide a blockchain-powered solution that will reward electric vehicle (EV) drivers with carbon credits. This project makes C+Charge the first on-chain or off-chain platform that gives access to carbon credits by allowing all C+Charge utility token holders the ability to earn carbon credits by simply driving and charging their EVs utilizing the C+Charge token with the C+Charge app at participating charging stations. The carbon credits issued by Flowcarbon would be blockchain tokenized carbon credits, ensuring high-quality carbon credits. In addition to this, all the data generated by C+Charge’s users would be stored on the blockchain, ensuring zero data manipulation and tamper-proof data capturing. Before this, carbon credits were reserved for EV car manufacturers and EV charging station owners.
Expected Benefits:
This project would encourage citizens to use EV vehicles, decreasing their vehicle’s GHG emissions.
The carbon credits earned by EV users can be sold to any third-party marketplace, opening a new stream of financial rewards for them.
This partnership would lower the barrier for users to enter the carbon credit marketplace, increasing its liquidity.
More Information: Newswire EIN
Celebrating blockchain’s energy efficiency through NFTs | Global
Project Description: Ethereum has been one of the most popular blockchain networks among developers since its launch in 2014. This popularity has been majorly driven by enterprise projects. According to a report published by Electric Capital, Ethereum’s developer base grew 42% during 2020-21. However, Ethereum has been criticized by many over its network’s energy consumption. A small change in its energy consumption could reap massive benefits over its vast network concentration. To celebrate the recent change in its network’s operation, ConsenSys has partnered with artist Chris Skinner and Keithcity Group to launch Regenesis. This NFT collection is celebrating Ethereum’s shift from proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and embodies the three main benefits of the merge - sustainability, security, and scalability. Ethereum already has a p-o-s chain, called the Beacon Chain, however it was not used for processing transactions. After this merge, the Beacon Chain would be merged with the mainnet (transaction execution layer). The NFT collection would be free to mint on the day of the merge, emphasizing sustainability as a forefront of change in the web3 environment. According to Ethereum’s website, the merge will reduce the network’s energy consumption by `99.95%. This would enable the network to implement even more energy-efficient and scalable operation practices like sharding (breaking each block into small shards).
Expected Benefits:
This NFT project could be the driving factor for showcasing sustainability importance in the web3 ecosystem.
The Ethereum merge could encourage other blockchain networks to implement energy-efficient initiatives in their operations.
More Information: Decrypt, Electric Capital, and Ethereum
Recycling
Blockchain expediting plastic waste recycling | Europe
Project Description: Consumer Electronics, Toys, and Textiles are a few of the most plastic-intensive industries in the world. This increasing plastic waste demands a strong recycling solution. However, manual sorting, sampling, tracing, and analyzing plastic waste is resource intensive and requires strong labor commitment. To address this, the EU has launched a ‘Plastics Recycling from and for Home Appliances, Toys and Textile (PRecycling)’ project that combines the expertise of BASF, Circularise, Fraunhofer, EuPC, AIMEN, NTUA, AIJU, and IRES. This project is financially backed by Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Program. The project will be leveraging blockchain technology for developing an easy-to-use methodology for sorting, sampling, tracing, recycling techniques, and analysis procedures of both plastic waste streams and recyclates. The digitization of the recyclates management would be handled by the MORE platform, an already established plastic recycling platform in the EU, and the blockchain solution provided by Circularise. The MORE platform will allow this consortium to develop a digital traceability system and information management system. Among other deliverables, the project will develop and demonstrate standard, robust, and, easy-to-use sampling and analysis procedures to ensure consistent recyclates quality and safe products. In addition, it will also develop methods for traceability of recyclates to allow the identification of the origin of recycled materials via digital information management and through marking technologies. All the data generated from this sorting and tracing would be stored on the blockchain, ensuring all the stakeholders to view and access this data in real time. This project complements other plastic recycling projects developed in Europe.
Expected Benefits:
Blockchain would establish a robust system, that can be replicated in other recycling sub-industries other than plastic.
Blockchain would ensure high quality and safe use, in addition, to verifying the recyclate content.
A transparent supply chain operation would enable project developers to access recycling efficiency in real time.
This project would drive a circular economy in the plastic industry in Europe.
More Information: Recycling Magazine
Renewable Energy
Blockchain-based infrastructure for sustainable energy | Oman
Project Description: In recent years, sustainable energy sources have gained massive popularity due to their tumbling costs of adoption, and rising awareness about climate change. Companies from around the world are looking to adopt sustainable energy sources such as solar, wind, biomass, and hydrogen to reduce their dependence on fossil-fuel-based energy sources. The Sultanate of Oman has set a mission to expedite the adoption of renewable energy in its Vision 2040. To realize this vision, the country is looking to adopt fourth industrial revolution technologies (4IR) to create an energy infrastructure of sustainable energy. Alshawamikh’s Energy (AE), the sustainable business unit of Al Shawamikh Oil Services Company, is partnering with Frontech to leverage blockchain technology to develop a sustainable energy management system. Frontech will represent the units of sustainable energy produced on the blockchain and will enable tracking and management of these units. This system is a step in the right direction when it comes to establishing an efficient, scalable, and sustainable energy management infrastructure for the country.
Expected Benefits:
Blockchain should create a trusted mechanism for companies to verify their production or consumption of renewable energy, which in turn should accelerate adoption.
The modern infrastructure should provide transparency to all relevant stakeholders including regulators and investors.
More Information: ITP and Alshawamikh Energy (AE)
Community Development
Blockchain facilitating secure and transparent donations | United States
Project Description: The shortage of funds or funding is one of the major issues faced by NGOs across the world. This can lead to financial instability for the NGO, hampering its cause. A sustainable measure would be to organize charity events and donate a certain percentage of the proceeds to the NGOs. In doing so, The David Bowie Estate has teamed up with a collection of digital artists for a special NFT series, in collaboration with OpenSea and We Love The Arts (We Few Group). The project, titled ‘Bowie On The Blockchain’, brings together nine artists in the digital collectible art field who have created pieces that reflect Bowie’s “influence across their artistic and personal identities”. All the profits from the sale of the artworks made by the Bowie estate will be donated to The CARE Organization. These NFTs would be minted on a blockchain network. The data generated from the NFT collection, including all the financial transactions, would be stored on the blockchain, ensuring zero data manipulation or financial fraud. The digital artists involved in the project are Nadya Tolokonnikova, Fewocious, Jake, Defaced, Osinachi, Young and Slick, Lirona, Glam Beckett, and Jonathan Wolfe. While the artist will design the artwork featured on the NFT, the mintage would be handled by We Love The Arts company, and the NFTs would be sold and traded on OpenSea.
Expected Benefits:
NFTs provide an inexpensive way to promote events and engage the audience, in this case, donors who want to support an NGO.
The NFTs would be tradable on any third-party exchange, encouraging active participation from the users.
This project would enable secure funding for CARE, ensuring trustworthiness in the system.
More Information: Coventry Live
Sustainable Finance
Shining light on ESG projects in the Metaverse | Singapore
Project Description: ESG-focused projects do a great job of addressing the persistent sustainability issues throughout the world. However, the operating costs of these projects demand certain external funding, and the lack of these funds can cause the projects to stop operations or even fail, hampering the project efficiency. To address this challenge, the DBS group is partnering with The Sandbox to create DBS BetterWorld, an interactive metaverse experience. This would provide an engagement platform for social entrepreneurs to highlight their ESG-focused projects. Under the partnership, DBS will acquire a 3x3 plot of LAND, a unit of virtual real estate in The Sandbox metaverse, which will be developed with immersive elements. Sandbox is built on top of the Ethereum network, meaning all the data generated through metaverse usage would also get stored on the Ethereum blockchain. In order to neutralize the carbon footprint of its metaverse presence will purchase carbon offsets, such that the land and production on the DBS BetterWorld metaverse world will be carbon neutral.
Expected Benefits:
Metaverse will actively engage entrepreneurs that are driving ESG-focused projects.
Raise awareness about sustainability issues among other users of the Sandbox metaverse
More Information: PTI and Outlook India
Community Health and Wellness
Digitizing healthcare services through metaverse | South Korea
Project Description: South Korea has been at a forefront of medical advancement in the healthcare industry. However, the pandemic has negatively impacted medical tourism, which contributes a large share of South Korea's GDP. This has forced the healthcare industry to digitize its services. Chosun University Hospital has signed an MoU with Deltoid to develop a metaverse platform where the hospital can provide healthcare services to patients. This platform will be called The Metaverse Clinic, where patients from around the world can access online medical services. This metaverse platform will be built on top of a blockchain network. A metaverse is a group of 3D virtual worlds where stakeholders can interact with each other, whilst the data generated is safely stored on the blockchain network. This will allow doctors and other health professionals to interact with patients, giving them easy access to healthcare services. The platform will also conduct educational programs for the hospital's foreign medical staff.
Expected Benefits:
This project will drive South Korea’s medical tourism, which is crucial for the country, especially after the pandemic.
Blockchain would provide safety and security in sharing and storing patients’ medical histories and records.
A platform like this would help the hospital to reach unaddressed patients from around the world, giving them easy access to basic healthcare services.
More Information: Healthcare IT News
Encouraging users to remain fit using NFTs and tokens | Global
Project Description: Physical activity is the best way to remain fit and healthy. However, due to changes in the lifestyle of many, taking time off to do exercise seems a bit challenging. This creates an opportunity for companies to encourage their users to remain fit and healthy. To do so, Sense4FIT is partnering with Elrond blockchain to add gamification and incentivize physical activity as a motivation to remain fit. The company would be leveraging NFTs and security tokens as a reward mechanism for its users, under the name ‘Fit to Earn’. By showcasing a certain amount of activity, the user can redeem blockchain-based security tokens from the app. This will enable them to buy in-game NFTs which can be traded on any third-party exchange, allowing them to earn a profit, according to the Sense4FIT website. In addition to this, users can also participate in various tournaments organized by game developers. All the data generated from the app would be stored on the Elrond blockchain platform, giving users full security and safety of their health data.
Expected Benefits:
The intersection of social, gaming, and finance would keep the users engaged with the game, improving their health and wellness.
Blockchain would enable Sense4FIT to mint unlimited NFTs and tokens.
More Information: Elrond and Sense4FIT
Incentivizing users for physical activeness | Global
Project Description: In today's day and age, physical fitness is getting more important than ever before. However, encouraging users to engage in health-focused activities such as walking, jogging, running, or swimming remains a challenge to overcome. To address this challenge, Motearn has created a blockchain-based Move-to-Earn (M2E) platform where users can receive financial rewards by showcasing their day-to-day fitness activities. However, the uniqueness of this project is that the company does not rely on GPS tracking. Rather they have developed a smart insole called Embry Smart Insoles, which includes activity auto-detection. In addition to this, the company tends to reward its users by giving them Connected Tangible NFT (ctNFT). These NFTs, which are upgradable, will help users to purchase smart wearable devices from Motearn’s website, acting as vouchers. Users can also generate MOT tokens by showcasing their physical activity. These tokens have the same utility as NFTs. To earn rewards, users must connect their smart products, including Embry Smart Insoles, to the app when conducting physical activities. The app will track their activity and generate rewards. While all the tokens and NFTs would be minted on the Solana blockchain, the user data generated from the activities would also get stored on the blockchain, providing security and immutability to the user data.
Expected Benefits:
This project would encourage users to actively participate in physical activities, ensuring a healthier lifestyle.
Blockchain would ensure that the user data would not get misused or mishandled by any third party.
More Information: CryptoPotato
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