Highly Suggested Reading: Waste Woes: How Blockchain Could Clean Up The Mess We're In (forbes.com)
Dr. Jemma Green 
CONTRIBUTOR
 
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.


https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2FMali Maeder

When recycling is too expensive, could blockchain present an opportunity?Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, a long way from the sea, you can’t have escaped the attention plastic waste is getting.

Plastic microfibers, PET bottles and plastic build ups of all descriptions are making the news as we wake up to the damage the waste packaging is doing to our planet, the sea and polar ice.The newfound awareness of this is no coincidence, either.

We’ve been plunged into a low-level crisis about what to do with our plastic junk.And the reason? There are many, of course. But at the end of last year, China banned its importation of plastic waste. To date, China has banned twenty-four categories of waste as part of a crackdown cleaning up its environment and infamous Beijing haze.

And the figures are as eye-watering as the smog associated with it. China was taking in more than 30 million metric tonnes of waste from every corner of the globe including the EU and Australia.

About one million plastic PET bottles are sold each minute around the globe. As we know, these don’t naturally degrade very quickly. Somehow, they get into the food chain and become next year’s sushi.

Suddenly all the western waste exporters are scratching their heads wondering what they should be doing with their waste packaging. Some cities in Australia, such as Ipswich, simply gave up, deciding to send their plastic into landfill sites instead. Others are waiting nervously before following suit.

"Since China has closed its doors to our waste, the effective cost increases to councils are 400 and 500 per cent — it's just not feasible that councils can sustain those losses,” Local Government Association of Queensland chief executive Greg Hallam said of the decision.

They simply can’t afford to process the junk without the resource of China’s cheap facilities. For them, sustainability isn’t profitable. While on the surface it makes sense to do the right thing for our planet, it’s not making economic cents.

View image on Twitter

DbIrDCfV4AIIRgk?format=jpg&name=small
GeWF2LdT_normal.jpg

Queensland Greens@QldGreensRecycling too hard for Ipswich Council? What a load of rubbish.10:25 AM - Apr 19, 2018

2517 people are talking about this
Twitter Ads info and privacy

Today, Ipswich City Council temporarily reversed its decision to send recycling to landfill, in response to public outrage. But the search for a permanent solution to their waste woes continues.

ESq82ZaY_normal.jpg

Josh Bavas@JoshBavas

Just in: Ipswich City Council intends to reverse its decision to send recycling to landfill. It is seeking a short term contractor but wants residents to reduce the contamination rates.

6:55 AM - Apr 20, 201810See Josh Bavas's other Tweets
Twitter Ads info and privacy

The obvious fix would be to start charging some kind of levy for removing your household’s waste. If that sounds a little draconian, you might like to know that Switzerland has been doing this for years. In Switzerland, if you want to get rid of garbage you have to buy a taxed green bag for the purpose and put your garbage in there.

If you don’t buy the right bag, no one will take it away, so you’re in effect forced to pay for the removal of your garbage.You can’t simply fly tip your rubbish in a neighbor’s bin because they’re locked. So your waste costs you money, and the more waste you make the more you pay.

Can We Trust The Supply Chain?

Such a model might work inside the highly self-policed culture of Switzerland, but other countries might struggle to implement this.In less law-abiding and affluent countries it could go a different way. There’s always the risk that someone down the chain does exactly what we saw during the 2013 meat scandal.

Namely, they corrupt the supply chain process as a way of making an illicit profit. 
In this case, they take a paid-for rubbish bag, save the costs of expensive repossessing and dump a taxed bag in the nearest sea or lake. But as in many supply chain situations, blockchain could help make sure the chain doesn’t get broken in a nefarious way.

Someone could buy a numbered green bag with a serial number on it and scan it into an app on a smartphone. Blockchain systems would then wait to see if an authorized waste reprocessing is picking up the same numbers at the end of the journey.

The Future Of Waste

In this instance accountability may be the cure. Consider the origins of a plastic water bottle washed up on shore. As well as the manufacturer and other companies in the supply chain, this enables us to put pressure on consumers to do better. When that same plastic water bottle is produced, it’s assigned to the manufacturer and this information is stored on the blockchain.

Additionally, each bottle could have a QR code stamped onto it. This not only helps us identify the manufacturer, but who ends up buying it.Suddenly, when that plastic bottle inevitably washes up on a beach somewhere, we’ve got someone to point the finger at.

Making Sustainability Profitable

Supply chains aside, what if the blockchain is a tool we can use in order to make sustainability profitable? It’s not as far-fetched as it may seem. In fact, there are already many waste-reduction blockchain startups off the ground such as global recycling enterprise, 
Plastic Bank.

The company aims to reduce waste in developing countries, and is 
already functioning in Haiti, Peru, Colombia and the Philippines. When people are struggling to feed their families, it’s no wonder they’re not using their time to fight environmental degradation.

Plastic Bank works by rewarding those who bring plastics to bank recycling centres in exchange for blockchain-secured digital tokens, which can be 
used to purchase food or phone-charging units.

View image on Twitter

DZdVIHXXcAAqfZ7?format=jpg&name=small
ibKdmyHe_normal.jpgSchwarzkopf@schwarzkopf

Not all parents can send their children to school - #MillionChances and @PlasticBank offers women in Haiti a regular and fixed income to support their children!

https://www.henkel.com/press-and-media/press-releases-and-kits/2018-02-21-less-plastic-waste-more-chances-for-women/830120 …
3:15 PM - Apr 19, 2018

6See Schwarzkopf's other Tweets
Twitter Ads info and privacy

“Many people we work with in developing countries lack bank accounts,” Plastic Bank co-founder Shaun Frankson said.  “Dealing in cash can be dangerous for them because of corruption and crime. But almost everyone—even in disadvantaged areas—has a mobile phone that supports digital transactions.

Meanwhile, the returned plastics are being purchased by companies and recycled into new consumer goods. The system is attractive to them because blockchain’s transparent nature means they can see where their investment goes.

“We’ve been inundated with demand for our solution,” Plastic Bank co-founder 
Shaun Frankson said.

“If we were using the old-school way of setting up teams and locations one by one, it would take far too long to stop the abundance of plastic making its way into our oceans. We need systems that can grow dynamically and handle billions of tons of collection from multiple locations at the same time.

”Of course setting up a system of this scale poses many logistical questions but it’s worth asking, as the rubbish piles up in various countries around the world, do we really have a choice?

Dr. Jemma Green is the Chair & Co-founder of PowerLedger.io and a researcher and speaker on the enterprise disruption caused by blockchain technology.

Disclosure: I own Bitcoin and POWR.
    • 2
    Francisco Gimeno - BC Analyst Exciting Blockchain use case report in waste treatment sector. There are already some companies using Blockchain here (giving tokens to those who recycle plastics for instance) and to track waste management from origin to destination. Waste business is not only important for Earth but is a multimillionaire business which can improve a lot using Blockchain platforms. What do you think? What is your experience?