From airfare, energy and onto packaging: Blockchain helps industries go green

Recently, Air India made it a policy to go completely green with vegetarian, nearly vegan meals for all passengers except business class. Yes, India is a country were vegetarian food is in high demand but the airline says that vegetarian meals get requested more often than non-vegetarian, even from tourists that are from traditional meat eating locales. The difference might be because New York Times Mark Bittman has been touting the vegetarian and vegan diet or the world really is focused on going green, even in industry. Now, the myth that there is a trade off between environmental sustainability and economic growth is being busted. Many industries and companies are actually seeing that sustainability results in higher economic production as they maximise resource conservation and reuse. Industries that were not traditionally focused on sustainability are now being touched by the low cost of green energy.

Software is presenting to us another layer to this sustainable economic output. Blockchain in particular is going to energize and catalyze this growth even more quickly.

Blockchain Transforms Efforts for Greening

Blockchain is a distributed governance mechanism that allows for public history that is totally traceable to form organically. In other words, with consensus, these systems are able to set an governance pattern, like a sustainability that companies can sign up to participate in. As the governance for sustainability policy is set, it can be programmed into a smart contract system that collects data automatically from company computers, and through independent sensors, to measure environmental impact. Imagine that when companies adhered to these practices, and were auditable, they received a boost from the network to be paid to be more sustainable while these policies brought costs down and led to easier resource management? That's the promise of blockchain.

Entire industries, no matter the background whether it is manufacturing, fashion, food, could use these software systems. Blockchain is totally decentralized and distributed so it can be audited by independent bodies like governments to audit and research the reputation of companies that are wishing to move or invest in their countries. This kind of technology would be extremely useful for a small but resource rich country like Costa Rica, for example. They would allow a grade A blockchain based reputation to identify those that they would enter into conversations with for business deals. A system like this would completely transform consumer technology hardware, for example, and inspire ready progress in technology to innovate new models that are innately sustainable and green from the beginning. In fact, a system like this would enable regenerative economics to begin to form. We would move from scarcity extractive economics to sustainability economics and then into fully regenerative economic systems.

Fully Auditable to Trace Environmental Impact Costs

These systems are also totally auditable any time on the web from anywhere in the world. In fact, imagine that a country's top companies would be required to sign up for these governance policy contracts for sustainability and the aggregating of this data, which cannot be changed, a country could be graded easily in real time on their impact to the environment. If citizens had this data available free flowing from devices hooked up all over the world, on the blockchain, they might be able to reverse trends like climate change and then be able to focus on climate regeneration instead.

Key Takeaways: Build Green Economy from the Ground Up

The green economy can really be built and programmed from the ground up in this manner. It's extremely critical that blockchain is enabled like this from a sustainability perspective just to track the movement of resources and to enable that they are being used effectively. From here, blockchain software could enable smart contracts to really track our entire global environment and from a collaborative sense take the approach for us to work on regenerating our natural world. For example IBM and the Beijing-based Energy Blockchain Labs are taking on the carbon asset market where they allow the trading of green assets using Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Fabric to deploy using the IBM blockchain. This effort is really important to China as they are the world's largest producer of carbon emissions while also aggressively attempting to bring sustainable practices into the country as fast as possible. The blockchain's set in stone history makes it cheaper for regulatory authorities to audit and oversee trading of carbon emission allowances under the cap-and-trade system. These are just a few of the possibilities that blockchain is beginning to present for greening industries globally.

About Nick:

Nikolaj Martyniuk is the Co-Founder and CEO of WePower, the blockchain based green energy sharing platform. Nick has 10 years of experience working in the energy sector, building energy and solar plants, and buying/selling green energy and green certificates. He also was involved in the energy import and export procedures between countries. He takes all his experience in the energy sector to WePower, in order to change the current energy market. The platform deploys smart contracts via a blockchain-based green energy trading network, that enables its participants to invest and finance green energy projects, as well as acquire green energy in an efficient, secure and transparent way. The company solves the insufficiencies in the energy market, by providing the first access to live trade in renewable energy globally for everyone.