• Blockchain-based system enables policy-grade traceability for plastic credits. • Smart contracts enforce automated compliance with EPR and ESG frameworks. • DApp supports decentralized oversight, reducing audit burden on regulators • System logs immutable offset records aligned with circular economy targets. • Architecture offers scalable digital infrastructure for waste policy integration. Plastic credit schemes are increasingly adopted to mitigate plastic pollution, yet existing systems remain centralized, opaque, and prone to double counting and fraud. This study proposes and validates a plastic credit system that leverages blockchain technology aimed at enhancing transparency, traceability, and accountability in plastic recovery efforts. A modular three-layer architecture was implemented, comprising a user interaction layer, a blockchain execution layer, and a utility layer for metadata and analytics integration. The system employs two smart contracts on the Polygon Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mainnet using Ethereum standards: ERC-20 for fungible tokenization of plastic credits and ERC-721 for non-fungible certificate issuance. Functional testing confirmed successful execution of token lifecycle operations. Stress testing across 5000 sequential transactions yielded stable performance, with average confirmation times of 5.29 s for fungible token operations and 5.59 s for non-fungible processes. A decentralized application (DApp) was developed to support role-based interaction, credit traceability, and certificate validation. User evaluation returned a high usability score (86.4%), while benchmarking against existing platforms demonstrated improved auditability, automation, and stakeholder control. These findings indicate that blockchain infrastructure can enable decentralized, tamper-resistant plastic credit systems. The proposed model provides a scalable foundation for Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) compliance and plastic waste traceability, which could potentially support the credibility of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting and supporting circular economy transitions across diverse policy and economic contexts.
Plastic pollution poses an escalating global threat, with Indonesia ranked among the largest contributors to marine plastic leakage due to inadequate waste management systems. Although blockchain technology has been increasingly applied to enhance transparency in various sectors, its direct integration into plastic waste management remains underexplored. This study proposes a blockchain-based cyberphysical system (CPS) that utilizes fungible tokens (FTs) to represent verified plastic recycling activities and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as immutable certificates of plastic offset achievements. Smart contracts were developed in Solidity and tested on a local Ganache blockchain by executing 100 sequential minting transactions. Validation results demonstrated an average confirmation time of approximately 1.388 seconds per transaction, indicating strong system performance under continuous load. The proposed model offers a decentralized, verifiable approach to plastic credit management, supporting Indonesia’s efforts toward Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 12 and 14.
Katarzyna Bułkowska, Magdalena Zielińska, Maciej Bułkowski
Effective management of recyclable plastic waste is critical for environmental sustainability and economic viability. Blockchain technology has transformative potential in addressing the challenges of plastic waste management. Currently, the inefficiency of plastic recycling systems results in low recycling rates and significant environmental impacts due to poor sorting, contamination, and limited technology application. However, innovations such as chemical recycling, solvent-based techniques, and biotechnology offer promising advances in the management of plastic waste. Blockchain technology provides a transparent, decentralized ledger that enhances traceability and incentives through smart contracts, decentralized applications (DApps), and digital watermarks. These blockchain solutions can improve waste tracking, automate payments, and reward participants who recycle responsibly. Although significant investment in technology and education is required, integrating blockchain with the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven analytics could revolutionize plastic waste management by creating transparent, efficient, and collaborative recycling ecosystems. Blockchain technology has immense potential to redefine the management of plastic waste and promote a sustainable, circular economy.
Textile waste constitutes a significant fraction of municipal solid waste sent to landfill or incinerated. Its innovative management is important to enhance sustainability and circularity. This review aims to present the latest policies and the state-of-the-art technologies in the collection, sorting and recycling of textile waste. Policies at global and regional levels are increasingly made to address the sustainability of the textile industry and integrate the concept of circular economy. They are crucial to driving changes and innovations in current textile waste management. The Internet of Things, big data, blockchain and smart contracts have been proposed to improve transparency, traceability and accountability in the textile waste collection process. They optimize collection routes, and transactions and agreements among stakeholders. The sorting of textile waste using near-infrared spectroscopy, optical sorting and artificial intelligence enables its separation based on composition, color and quality. The mechanical recycling of textiles regenerates fibers with the same or different applications from those of the original fabrics. Fibers have been used for making building and slope protection materials. Chemical recycling depolymerizes waste textiles using chemicals to produce monomers for new textiles or other materials, while biological recycling uses enzymes and microorganisms for this purpose instead of chemicals. Thermal recycling recovers energy and fuels from textile waste through pyrolysis, gasification and hydrothermal liquefaction. These innovations may have the drawbacks of high cost and scalability. This review contributes to decision making by synthesizing the strengths and weaknesses of the innovations in textile waste management.
Rahim Zahedi, Alireza Aslani, Mohammad Ali Nasle Seraji
An unprecedented emergence has occurred for the cryptocurrencies among enterprises, customers, and investors as a result of the growing number of internet connections worldwide. The most popular cryptocurrency is Bitcoin representing the rise of digital payment systems. Though, harsh criticism has been also created for cryptocurrencies about their environmental sustainability and power consumption, decelerating the acceptance of bitcoin by consumer as a means of payment. The ecological impact or footprint of a process is determined mainly through life-cycle-assessment (LCA) quantifying all material flows’ inputs and outputs for a process or product and their effect on the environment. This study provides LCA-based framework to show the environmental impacts of Bitcoin mining from top ten miner countries (China, USA, Kazakhstan, Russia, Iran, Malaysia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Norway). The results show that with the share of 53.3% of the world’s mining, China has the most negative environmental impact specially in marine ecotoxicity with 26.8 kg 1,4-DCB and human health with 0.0043 DALY but with the equal mining ratio Germany and Kazakhstan have the most negative environmental impacts.
Rajendra S. Chaudhari, S. Mahajan, Santosh B. Rane, Rajeev Agrawal
Climate change poses a real risk, as does a shortage of resources to accommodate the world's rising population. Every nation is trying to produce maximum without caring for the environment. As a result, the circular economy (CE) is critical to the long-term sustainability of society, business and the environment. Government and policymakers are forcing industries and organizations to adopt or establish CE in their businesses to protect the environment. However, the concept of CE is unclear, and there are various hurdles and barriers to adopting a CE in industries and organizations. For a sustainable environment, CE barrier management plays a crucial role. This paper aims to explore and prioritize barriers to establishing a CE. A detailed methodological literature review is carried out to explore the twenty-nine barriers in CE. The various barriers to CE are prioritized using the Multi-criteria decision-making methods Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). Based on the TOPSIS barrier of increased emission and pollution while recycling was found to be a top rank and the barrier of tedious environmental regulations and lack of government support was found to be at the lowest rank. The top priorities are the barriers to increasing emission and pollution while recycling, radically changing production, and lack of public participation in using recycled products. The Blockchain-IoT architecture and strategies are developed to mitigate all these barriers. As in CE, resources are not ending as these are recyclables since products are made to last several life cycles. Product's lifespans are extended by maintaining, repairing and re-manufacture to reduce carbon footprints in the environment. This barrier ranking will help supply chain professionals and business executives analyze the failure to implement CE in industries. Strategies and architecture based on blockchain-IoT will also help in mitigating the barrier in CE. This study will give new dimensions for the adaption of CE in industries. CE will create sustainable ecosystems for soil, air and water. These sustainable ecosystems provide a long and healthy life for all living things on this planet.
Researchers estimate that more than 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic have been produced since the early 1950s; however, only 9% of all plastic waste ever produced has been recycled. In this article, we propose a plastic credit driven system consisting of a recyclability index (RI) and plastic credit to impel plastic recycling and increase the quality of recyclable plastics through a market self-regulation mechanism. The RI is designed to evaluate the recyclability value of different plastic products based on their material compositions. The plastic credit, defined by the quantitative relation between the RI and product information, can be issued or traded by system stakeholders. Instead of setting rigid industry standards to regulate plastic quality, we construct a governance community among industry participants using blockchain-enabled smart contracts to self-regulate and monitor plastic production and trading. The proposed system is constructed on a consortium blockchain and a public blockchain to negotiate the RI, issue credits, and trade credits using smart contracts. Through the overall system performance analysis, the experimental results demonstrate that the designed plastic credit system can promote a demand shift toward plastic products with higher plastic recyclability and achieve a lightweight operation for resource requirements and system maintenance.
Abstract From the environmental perspective, efficient plastic utilization and its recyclability become significant issues that need to be resolved for deploying urban and sustainable technologies. It is estimated that approximately 400 million tons of plastic are produced each year for different applications. This number will be doubled by 2050, which is a serious problem. The primary issue that arises in a recycling process is associated with optimum supply chain management. The comprehensive and transparent supply chain methodologies will help stockholders to make conclusive policies and precise strategies. Transparency in supply chain management assists in captivating planning, pricing, purchasing, and inventory management decisions. Environmental sustainability requires recycling, which should have innovative concepts like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Block‐chain Technology. Manual methods of sorting and segregating the waste have outdated and not much efficient. The inclusion of AI and Blockchain Technology brought a revolution by increasing the efficiency and accuracy of the recycling process. This critical review focused on recycling plastics and plastic waste using AI and Blockchain Technology. Various plastic regulation policies and AI utilization for plastic recycling are discussed. An overview of the blockchain and its classification for waste management or plastic recycling has been discussed. The utilization of Blockchain Technology for a plastic circular economy, its types, and critical benefits has also been systematically demonstrated.
The textile sector accounts for the fourth-highest usage of primary raw materials and water (after food, housing, and transport), the second-highest usage of land, and the fifth highest Green House Gases (GHG) emissions (EEA, 2017). While Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been widely used to assess the environmental impact of fashion, most studies are constrained by the lack of reliable data. Blockchain technology may enable better traceability by making origin and journey more transparent. The potential to integrate LCA and blockchain has been discussed in other sectors, but specific protocols in the fashion sector are largely missing. This study aims to address this by a) exploring the use of LCA to measure the impact reduction potential of circular strategies and b) proposing a protocol for the integration of LCA and BC to accurately assess circular practices. Using leather handbags as a case study, an LCA study is conducted comparing two circular scenarios against a baseline to quantify potential benefits from circular strategies. Subsequently, it builds a blockchain-based LCA framework to unleash circularity opportunities through enhanced traceability and data sharing. Results point to substantial environmental benefits from the circular strategies, for example, circular scenario 2 (reuse markets/second-hand leather bag) was estimated to cause between 34.8% and 53.8% lower impacts while circular scenario 1 (leather alternative) contributed to impact reduction of more than 35% of the impacts in most impact categories (10 out of 18). The results also highlight the contribution of blockchain technology to enable traceability and reliable data for identification of environmental hotspots and accurate quantification of circular potential.
Md Masuduzzaman, Tariq Rahim, Anik Islam, Soo Young Shin
This article presents a deep learning (DL) model integrated automated and secure garbage management scheme using unmanned any vehicle (UxV) to minimize the human effort in terms of the traditional garbage management system. Different kinds of UxV (unmanned aerial vehicles, automated guided vehicles, unmanned surface vehicles, unmanned underwater vehicles, etc.) are utilized to establish an automated garbage management scheme to collect and place the garbage both from the ground and sea surfaces. However, due to the limited battery capacity and inadequate resources of different UxV, a lightweight DL model is developed to detect the garbage successfully with a higher accuracy rate. The proposed lightweight DL model uses two activation functions named MISH and rectified linear unit to enhance the feature extraction and detect the garbage. Moreover, a multiaccess edge computing (MEC) server is allocated in the proposed scheme to improve the Quality of Service (QoS) (i.e., reduce latency and improve security). Furthermore, a blockchain-based secure hazardous garbage (e.g., infectious, toxic, or radioactive materials) tracking technique is concluded in this scheme to identify the individual and reduce the potential harm to the environment. Experimental results demonstrate that the UxV can successfully detect the garbage using the proposed lightweight DL model within a minimum time frame and the obtained accuracy is higher than the other existing DL models. Besides, QoS has been investigated to verify the efficacy of the proposed scheme. Finally, a private blockchain network is established to demonstrate the performance of the proposed hazardous garbage tracking technique.
Yu Gong, Yan Wang, Regina Frei, Bill Wang · 5 authors
The threat to the environment and humanity caused by marine plastic debris has aroused global attention. This research aims to explore the feasibility of applying blockchain technology (BCT) in marine plastic debris management. A case study on three pioneer recycling organizations is conducted based on secondary data. The study found that BCT can be applied to solve some of the existing challenges of marine plastic debris management. A digital token system and identity recognition mechanism based on BCT can increase the public awareness for marine plastic debris governance. The derived digital wallets and distributed ledgers can effectively replace paper documents and cash transactions in the traditional recycling chain, and minimize global impact on local economies, thus improve efficiency and safety. Also, the traceability and high transparency of blockchain and the application of smart contracts can effectively build a global recycling network. In addition, the application of BCT can greatly improve the transparency of recycling value chains, and make them more accepting of supervision from society and consumers. This research is one of the first studies on BCT in marine plastic debris management and explores worldwide pioneering companies. In practice, this study can help companies analyse the defects in their own waste disposal models and help practitioners make decisions to adopt BCT. In academia, as one of the early exploratory studies on the application of BCT to the treatment of marine plastic debris, this study provides further empirical reference on BCT based business models and recycling chains, and can guide future research in this field.
Blockchain technology is emerging as a plausible disruptor of waste management practices that influence the governance of plastics. The interest among the waste management community in the potential and fundamental changes to complex resource management associated with blockchain adoption parallels recent research in other sectors, such as finance, health, public administration, etc. During any comparable period characterized by a step-change in positive coverage of an early-stage technology, it can be challenging for actors to access a grounded, evidence-based oversight of the current state of practice and make informed decisions about whether or how to adopt blockchain technology. The current absence of such a systematic overview of recent experiences with blockchain initiatives disrupting waste practices not only limits the visibility of these experimental efforts, but also limits the learning that can be shared across waste plastics researcher and practitioner communities. This paper contributes with a current overview of blockchain technology adoption in the waste management sector, giving particular attention to implications for the governance of plastics. Our study draws on both primary interview data and secondary documentation data to map the landscape of current blockchain initiatives in the global waste sector. We identify four areas of blockchain use that are beginning to change waste management practices (payment, recycling and reuse rewards, monitoring and tracking of waste, and smart contracts). We conclude by outlining five areas of significant blockchain uses, implications, and influences of relevance to the development of circular plastic waste governance in both research and practice.
Global plastic waste is increasing rapidly. In general, densely populated regions generate tons of plastic waste daily, which is sometimes disposed of on land or diverged to sea. Most of the plastics created in the form of waste have complex degradation behavior and are non-biodegradable by nature. These remain intact in the environment for a long time span and potentially originate complications within terrestrial and marine life ecosystems. The strategic management of plastic waste and recycling can preserve environmental species and associated costs. The key contribution in this work focuses on ongoing efforts to utilize plastic waste by introducing blockchain during plastic waste recycling. It is proposed that the efficiency of plastic recycling can be improved enormously by using the blockchain phenomenon. Automation for the segregation and collection of plastic waste can effectively establish a globally recognizable tool using blockchain-based applications. Collection and sorting of plastic recycling are feasible by keeping track of plastic with unique codes or digital badges throughout the supply chain. This approach can support a collaborative digital consortium for efficient plastic waste management, which can bring together multiple stakeholders, plastic manufacturers, government entities, retailers, suppliers, waste collectors, and recyclers.
Virgin polymers based on petrochemical feedstock are mainly preferred by most plastic goods manufacturers instead of recycled plastic feedstock. Major reason for this is the lack of reliable information about the quality, suitability, and availability of recycled plastics, which is partly due to lack of proper segregation techniques. In this paper, we present our ongoing efforts to segregate plastics based on its types and improve the reliability of information about recycled plastics using the first-of-its-kind blockchain smart contracts powered by multi-sensor data-fusion algorithms using artificial intelligence. We have demonstrated how different data-fusion modes can be employed to retrieve various physico-chemical parameters of plastic waste for accurate segregation. We have discussed how these smart tools help in efficiently segregating commingled plastics and can be reliably used in the circular economy of plastic. Using these tools, segregators, recyclers, and manufacturers can reliably share data, plan the supply chain, execute purchase orders, and hence, finally increase the use of recycled plastic feedstock.
OpenLitterMap rewards users with Littercoin for producing open data on litter. Open data on the geospatial characteristics of litter provide means of invoking and evaluating responses to plastic pollution. OpenLitterMap currently works as a web app on all devices with native mobile apps in development. The stack includes the integration of the Laravel PHP Framework on the backend; Vue for frontend reactivity; NativeScript-Vue for mobile apps; Bulma for CSS; Leaflet for web-mapping; Turf.js for geospatial analysis; the Ethereum Blockchain for tokenization; Stripe; ChartJS; AWS; and more. Anywhere from a single cigarette butt to the contents of an entire beach or street clean can be logged in a single geotagged photo. Alternatively, a simple index may be used if litter is incalculable. The open data includes an increasing 100+ pre-defined types of litter; 20+ corporate brands; verification status; coordinates; timestamp; phone model; the latest OpenStreetMap address at each location; and the litter presence as a Boolean. To date, 100% of all submitted data (~ 8200 photos, ~ 28,000 litter from over 150 contributors) has been manually verified which is being used to develop machine learning algorithms.