BCSD Sustainability Challenge
How can a company use Blockchain to make its supply chain more transparent and enable end consumers to monitor and choose products according to its carbon footprint?
Proposed by
BCSD Portugal – Conselho Empresarial para o Desenvolvimento Sustentável (Enterprise Council for Sustainable Development) is a non-profit association of public interest that represents companies engaged with sustainability. Through the conception of inter-companies projects that promote sustainable development, BCSD Portugal has been an active player in Portugal over the last 15 years. Inspiring new business models that are competitive, innovative, responsible, sustainable and inclusive, BCSD Portugal is the leader organization in sustainable development within the business community.
Description
The World Economic Forum has already stated that carbon credits are the perfect candidates for crypto tokens as these are data-driven, rely on multiple approval steps and are independent from the physical impact to which they correlate. Furthermore, through smart contracts and verifiable transactions, Blockchain technology addresses all the concerns and challenges associated with lack of standardization.
With this challenge, we aim to encourage the development of solutions that increase suppliers’ accountability within the supply chain of a company or group of companies. Blockchain can help companies meet the demand for accurate, reliable, standardized and available information for carbon emission calculation. Blockchain technology promotes instant authentication, immutable data records and smart contracts to integrate suppliers, manufacturers, logistics service providers, and stocking locations into a single network for rule-based interactions and value generation.
The Blockchain technology has enormous potential to combine efforts and aggregate information with the goal of tracking – and thus reducing – the carbon footprint reduction of any given final product. In a Blockchain network, each party will be able to report the carbon emissions across their individual value chains based on standardized metrics, thereby creating a single platform for carbon measurement. Blockchain can deliver standardized and accepted algorithms to calculate carbon emissions. This can be one of the key benefits of the integrated platform.
Moreover, connecting Blockchain to various source systems such as ERP and SCADA will simplify data gathering across the supply chain, thereby improving visibility at lower cost, time and effort. Manufacturers, suppliers and distributors can work together in a transparent and accountable manner with the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) or retailer to drive a unified carbon ecosystem with accurate measurement and credits.
A possible solution is to develop a SCM monitoring network that provides carbon footprint data and patterns to help governments and companies define policies and best practices for incentivize low carbon footprint and sustainable product development.
We are particularly interested in solutions that leverage shared data and distributed solutions to:
- Use SCM carbon footprint data to predict product carbon weight and create more carbon efficient product designs
- Guarantee the sustainability of suppliers within the supply chain of a company or group of companies;
- Integrate data of different modalities (carbon metrics, SCM data, total cost of carbon footprint) to produce useful data services;
- Forecast and optimise SCM usage and consumer and end user satisfaction levels, including in multi-stakeholder scenarios.
Data
Examples of data include, but are not limited to:
- SC Carbon footprint data
- ERP, SCM data
- Company data
- Maintenance and usage history
- Environmental data
- Geospatial data
Expected outcomes
Examples of outcomes may include, but are not limited to:
- SC carbon footprint monitoring Blockchain based solution
- New algorithms (supply chain analysis and monitoring, carbon footprint analysis, prediction of spikes in carbon footprint, event processing)
- DLT Tools for footprint reporting and visualisation of analytics results
Expected impacts
Participants will need to provide details on how they would develop a Blockchain solution as well as to demonstrate how that solution can:
- Monitor carbon footprint
- Disclose reliable information about a product’s carbon footprint
- Improve overall company sustainability and reputation
- Minimize consumer risks; and/or support low carbon footprint providers and SCM pathways
- Monitor and compare data on consumption trends and carbon footprint
