How enterprise blockchain supports sustainability in your company

Track and trace systems 

Food traceability is important to provide documentation on the source and quality of ingredients used and keep track of food conditions during transportation and storage. Blockchain distributed ledger technology tracks and records relevant data through the entire agricultural chain, potentially allowing various parties in the ecosystem to gain access to information when needed. Technologies such as smart contracts, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and predictive machine learning tools can be integrated with blockchain to provide a more holistic system to improve data integrity.

Voluntary carbon credits tracking

Voluntary carbon markets enable individuals and organizations to purchase verified carbon dioxide emission reductions through carbon credits or offsets. Blockchain technology provides transparency and a secure audit trail in tracking carbon credits and offsets ownership. It helps address challenges such as double counting, information asymmetry, verification of additionality, disintermediation of brokers, transparency and market efficiency. It also helps with monitoring, verification and certification. 

Challenges of using blockchain 

While there are benefits of using blockchain technology to enable sustainability across supply chains, organizations may face significant challenges in adoption.

Due to the globalized nature of existing supply chains, the technology needs to be adopted across multiple jurisdictions. For organizations in developing countries, the costs associated with blockchain implementation might be too high. In addition, the lack of IT capabilities in these jurisdictions can be a barrier to adoption.

To truly benefit from a blockchain solution, it is important for all stakeholders in the ecosystem to see the value in adopting blockchain technology. As the number of stakeholders across a supply chain or value chain increase, the complexity also increases. Traceability can be hard to achieve in supply chains where an asset must pass through multiple stakeholders. This gets more complicated if digitization is not uniform across the stakeholders.

The garbage in, garbage out problem is noteworthy. If data collection processes are prone to errors, the transparency and immutability of the blockchain will not benefit stakeholders. Therefore, business processes that capture data must be efficient and streamlined. Given the novelty of blockchain, there are still misconceptions that the technology is only used for cryptocurrencies, which can prevent stakeholders from considering it from a business perspective.

Despite these challenges, there is great potential for blockchain technology to improve the performance and efficiency of existing value chains. The current emphasis on transparency, traceability and provenance to help achieve sustainability goals is also expected to drive greater blockchain adoption.