How Blockchain is Being Applied in the Circular Economy – A Look at 3 Use Cases

A worker walking between heaps of garbageCircular economy refers to a style of producing goods and services while minimizing waste generation.

The notion of the circular economy can be described by the three Rs:

• Reducing materials and waste
• Reusing products
• Recycling materials

The circular economy aims to transform the economy into one that is regenerative.

An economy that innovates to reduce waste and the ecological and environmental impact of industries prior to happening rather than waiting to address the consequences of these issues. This is done by designing new processes and solutions for the optimization of resources, decoupling reliance on finite resources.

SEE ALSO: 4 Blockchain Use Cases Solving Africa’s Biggest Problems

Here is where several organizations are looking to the blockchain.

Monochain

MonoChain is on a mission to utilize blockchain technology to keep around $460 billion worth of clothes out of landfills every year.

MonoChain’s blockchain solution connects the primary and ‘second sale’ markets which facilitates the reuse of products and helps to extend products’ lives. For the end customers, they can see items’ provenance and their ‘worth or ‘resale value’ in real time and find out the best places to sell them.

This approach creates a tangible way for customers to resell or reuse their items with simple solutions.

RemediChain

In the U.S., $100 billion in medication is destroyed annually while approximately 32 million Americans cannot afford the medication they need.

RemediChain is disrupting the game and providing a solution by redistributing unused, still-viable medicine to patients who need it. This, in turn, helps people in need and reduces pharmaceutical waste.

The RemediChain platform incentivizes community members to text a picture of their unused prescriptions. When medication is identified, the platform generates a prescription donation form and link that covers shipping to its facility

The platform, which uses the Ethereum blockchain, checks the quality of donations and tracks their provenance from source to destination – either to patients or to government-approved incinerators.

Bext360

Bext360, a startup in the field of agriculture, is utilizing blockchain technology to better track and verify the authentication of critical supply chains like coffee, cocoa, cotton, palm oil, and recyclables.

The SaaS platform integrates the blockchain and quantifiable sustainability measurements to provide a traceable fingerprint from producer to consumer.

Because these products originate from around the world and sold through global retailers, Bext360 also operates globally, with customers not only in the U.S. and Europe, but also across Ghana, Paraguay, Somalia, and many more

In conclusion, the above 3 solutions utilize blockchain technology in 2 main ways:

• Blockchain technology provides transparency and traceability of data across several systems, which efficiently facilitates the provenance of items
• Blockchain technology helps combat counterfeiting and its substantial negative environmental and social impacts in terms of materials used

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