It started out as two separate projects at the Climate Accounting and Action SIG, a Hyperledger group focused on using blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT’s) to solve climate problems.
Bertrand Rioux, then a Research Fellow at the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, started a project to use Hyperledger and DLT’s to reduce methane emissions in oil and gas production.
Meanwhile, halfway around the world in Los Angeles, Si Chen, who had developed open source ERP and CRM software and runs an ecommerce company, started a project to reduce emissions in transportation and the supply chain with DLT’s.
Then the world changed.
War, trade embargoes, and soaring energy prices have sent countries around the world scrambling to secure their energy sources.
Would this derail our last chance to reduce emissions and stop climate change?
Amazingly, the answer is no in at least one important way: Reducing methane emissions from oil and gas production could both help improve energy security and help the climate at the same time.
Here’s why: Each day at an oil or natural gas field, excess methane either leaks from the ground or is burnt (or “flared.”) This methane could also be sold as natural gas and used later if it could be captured and transported. The amount is mind boggling. According to FlareIntel, 260 billion cubic meters of methane is lost each year. This is 1.7 times the amount of natural gas Europe imports from Russia. It also has the climate impact of 1.3 billion cars — almost all the cars in the world, or nearly seven times the emissions of all the world’s airlines.
Capturing and using this methane as natural gas would both increase the amount of energy available and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Yet while the energy industry is behind it with many new initiatives, a lack of data on methane emissions and lack of focus to reduce them has held back progress. To encourage greater momentum, several groups have started to produce certifications for responsibly sourced natural gas, but these certifications are often proprietary and opaque to the general public.
The Climate SIG rallied together to address this critical problem with a bold plan: An open certification of natural gas that could be transferred through the supply chain, running on open source software and through distributed ledgers, so that it could be transparent to regulators, investors, and the general public. The solution involves four steps that combine the work of Methane Reduction and Supply Chain Decarbonization SIG projects:
1. Combine data from multiple sources, including company reports, government data sources, ground instrument readings, and satellite data, to calculate the total methane emissions from both leakage and flaring. 2. Calculate added emissions impact from the combined methane emissions. 3. Transfer the added emissions down the supply chain, from oil well to resellers to eventually the gas utilities. 4. At each stage, certify the quality of the natural gas based on the added methane emissions.
This project has grown from the two original developers to a larger group. Even though the developers are from around the world and have never met in person, they’re working together the open source way. Through Zoom calls, wiki pages, and shared code repositories, they’ve been building a prototype for the Hyperledger Global Challenge while interviewing industry members, data providers, and government regulators.
We would like to call your attention to the launch of the Hyperledger Governance,Risk and Compliance Special Interest Group (GRC SIG). The Hyperledger GRC SIG intends to focus on the adoption of blockchain technology in solving digital trust issues, making GRC practices more transparent, and simplifying the adoption by GRC practitioners.
Join us for our first meeting on February 9th, 9:30 PM IST/8 AM PST/4 PM GMT – Meeting Details
Technology has solved many legacy challenges, simplified processes and brought optimization, but, at the same time, it can add more complexities and expose to various risks if organizations don’t have expertise or adopted technologies in their nascent stage. With this SIG, we will help practitioners not just get familiarized with the technology but also assist in solving business trust issues by building decentralized GRC apps. We will also help them educate their organizations or customers about how to define the right set of controls to mitigate IT risk because of blockchain adoption.
To keep it simple, this group will explore using decentralized, permissioned Hyperledger blockchain technology to build applications that will streamline the way global organizations run their GRC practices. Blockchain has a huge potential for building trust and improving data accessibility by maintaining transparency along with cryptographic hash security. The SIG will discuss and explore the following relevant technologies:
Hyperledger Fabric and other Hyperledger umbrella projects for GRC
Tokenomics
DAO and Distributed Governance Models
New Consensus Mechanisms
The Governance, Risk and Compliance process includes these three elements:
Governance is the oversight role and the process by which companies manage and mitigate business risks
Risk management enables an organization to evaluate all relevant business and regulatory risks and controls and monitor mitigation actions in a structured manner
Compliance ensures that an organization has the processes and internal controls to meet the requirements imposed by governmental bodies, regulators, industry mandates, or internal policies.
As part of this SIG, we will explore the areas within GRC space where blockchain can play a crucial role. For example, blockchain can help with digital trust in third party partnerships. It can also promote adoption of technology for IT auditing, organization and regulatory compliance when it comes to blockchain-based enterprise solutions, crypto and NFTs, transparent Environment Social Governance aspects, and more
To make this group successful, we would be happy to work with enthusiastic developers, students, GRC practitioners and all manner of professionals to take this SIG forward and make it into an industry standard.
Visit our GRC SIG wiki page to learn more details about the SIG’s charter and how to get involved. We encourage you to join this community by visiting the links below:
We are excited to launch GRC SIG and are looking forward to collaborating with you. Come join us at the launch event on February 9th, 9:30 PM IST/8 AM PST/4 PM GMT! Find meeting details here.
This four-part series is aimed at using the open source and collaborative nature of blockchain to tackle issues plaguing human consumption and improve society for future generations. We hope that this series can invoke quick movement on use cases with high potential to improve social good.
In Part I we looked at how governments can create markets to solve recycling contamination and reward citizensviablockchain. This engages consumers, reduces confusion and boosts recycling participation. Part II (below) focuses on using blockchain to track hazardous and toxic materials from the point of purchase to ensure proper material handling to prevent fires, death, and pollution. Part III looks at government tax credits to expedite the adoption of recycling and composting programs by communities and businesses, while using blockchain to verify compliance, traceability, and program participation. Lastly, in Part IV we will discuss Zero Waste initiatives that cities, businesses, and facilities can implement to reduce the carbon and pollutant impact of their supply chains.
Part II Tracking Hazardous and Toxic Materials
Pollution, Chemicals, and Fires
Pollution is the presence of some materials in the environment and the state of the natural environment being contaminated with potentially harmful substances as an outcome of human activities. Annually, there are over 4.2 million deaths due to outdoor air pollution. Water pollution caused 1.8 million deaths in 2015. As of September 2021, nearly 300 million tons of hazardous waste has been thrown out globally since the beginning of this year alone! Human consumption can cause substantial harm to our health leading to chronic diseases, environmental harms, and death. In addition, studies show that toxic chemicals are invading our bodies and breast-feeding women are passing these toxic chemicals on to their babies. These chemicals can cause cancer and reproductive issues, damage DNA, and disrupt hormone systems of animals and people, among a myriad of other risks.
Indeed, human consumption directly impacts our air, water, and soil throughout the entire product supply chain. From the extraction of raw materials to the manufacturing processes, transportation, distribution, storage, consumption, and ultimate disposal of materials in landfills and incinerators, each step of the chain releases carbon, chemicals, and other pollutants into groundwater, toxify the earth’s soil, and pollutes our air. However, for this specific blog, we are focusing on the end of the supply chain, looking at how we can keep potentially hazardous and toxic materials in circulation while minimizing impact by enforcing the proper disposal of these materials.
On the bright side, controlling pollution and human consumption has a great return on investment. According to the Lancet Commission on Health, the global economic costs of pollution are massive, totaling “$4.6 trillion per year—6.2% of global economic output.” In the United States, air pollution control pays off at a rate of 30-1. Every dollar invested in air pollution control generates thirty dollars of benefits. Since 1970, the United States has invested around $65 billion in air pollution control and received around $1.5 trillion in benefits. Indeed, hazardous materials have the potential to desperately impact vulnerable communities, but the efforts to control them also provide an opportunity to create jobs, improve health, and create economic opportunity.
Fires
Do you know where to recycle/properly dispose of your electronics, chemicals, and other hazardous materials? Do you know if your trash or recycling was the cause of a fire? Improper disposal of dangerous material can lead to fires that occur in collection trucks, trash cans and dumpsters, or a recycling, landfill, or incineration facility. For example, lithium ion batteries in electronics can cause fires that ignite nearby materials creating an uncontrollable blaze. These fires often require the fire station to put them out and result in additional chemicals such as Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to be released into the environment.This further pollutes our air, water, and soil. Even when people know about the dangers, processes to motivate consumers and inspire behavior change are lacking. Further, because of the vast amount of materials in our supply chains, it is complicated to know what to dispose of where, and what can be potentially dangerous to frontline workers and vulnerable communities.
The scenario below provides greater detail using an example from our household electronics.
Scenario #2 Harry’s Hazardous Mishap
Let’s assume Harry just broke his new electronic device that contains a lithium-ion battery. Instead of taking it to a local electronics retailer, the local hazardous recycling center, or having it collected, he tosses the device into his trash can. On garbage day, the garbage collector (Wanda Worker) arrives, uses the claw to collect Harry’s trash and is off to the next home. It is a hot day. About thirty minutes later, Wanda is almost done with her route and begins to head back to dump her truckload. She looks in her sideview mirrors and begins to see smoke billowing out of her truck. She radios into dispatch that she might have a problem. Quickly the smoke starts to increase, and Wanda is forced to dump her truckload for her own safety, to protect the vehicle, and even prevent an explosion from occurring. Dispatch calls emergency services, and a firetruck and ambulance arrive shortly to put out the fire and check on Wanda.
A scenario like this happened as recently as May of this year in Manassas, Virginia. Find a news link here. Find the tweet here. The article also reports that there was a fire at the Material Recovery Facility as well earlier in the week. Two fires in one week! On July 7, 2021, a Waste Management vehicle caught fire in Oregon. This electronics recycling problem is not siloed to the United States; here is a video from a fire in Australia:
The statistics are not crystal clear on how many fires occur due to people improperly disposing of materials, but it has been reported that there are over 8,000 landfill fires occur annually. Humans have more and more devices in our home, and we must take special precautions when handling them at the end of life. Fires caused by batteries, devices and related materials are just one example. There are other chemical instances, such as paints, heavy metals and other substances that might not spark a fire, but are toxic when disposed of and can ultimately enter our groundwater supply. For example, when it rains on landfills, the rain can flush these chemicals into our water supply as leachate.
When businesses dump hazardous waste, there are often repercussions. For instance, Home Depot was fined $27.84 million in California for improperly disposing of hazardous waste. However, consumer enforcement is much more difficult, costly, and essentially non-existent as it requires a manual inspection of thousands of trash and recycling containers. In addition, there are privacy concerns surrounding people inspecting trash and recycling. In some cases, it could be ruled an invasion of privacy, whereas in other areas private receptacles are subject to inspection.
So where does blockchain come into play? Blockchain creates new models for ensuring that these hazardous items never end up in the wrong place and that those creating dangerous and unsafe workplaces for frontline workers, toxifying our water supply and contributing to air and soil pollution are held accountable. Dangerous and hazardous materials can be tracked from the point of purchase and verified once the person disposes of them in the proper location. This material list could range from electronics to chemicals and any other poisonous or toxic material. A discount or other brand powered incentive could encourage people to properly handle and dispose of these types of materials. Essentially, it would amount to a brand-powered “bottle” bill for hazardous and dangerous materials, which result in fires, groundwater contamination and air pollution, especially in vulnerable communities.
Chem Chain is a company that focuses on tracking the chemicals contained in products to educate consumers on the risks that exist throughout the supply chain and looks at the impact of the products we use on a daily basis. Deloitte also provided some guidance on how blockchain can be used to tackle these issues in the chemical industry supply chain.
The IBM Food Trust certification program could also be a model for tracking hazardous waste. It even provides a roadmap for monitoring and measuring the overall impact of individual consumers disposing of materials properly and the economic savings from reduced fires, pollution, and safety issues that are created by toxic and hazardous materials.
By requiring certificates on a blockchain chain powered by the state or federal government, municipalities and other entities could issue licenses for these types of household electronics from the point of purchase. The license would mandate that they can’t be disposed of in the trash or recycling. Instead, they must be dropped off at a collection site, to ensure that the materials are properly handled. Indeed, this could create a market for licensed material collectors to handle materials on an ad-hoc personalized basis from consumers homes and create more public awareness around this ever present issue..
Programs like this can encourage individuals to purchase more sustainable and circular products. But, in the case where these metals and lithium-ion batteries cannot be avoided, at least we can ensure Wanda Worker gets home to her family safely as the public becomes motivated to get educated and do the right thing.
The purpose of these blogs is to stir ideas and innovation in the circular economy to better understand the current interactions of material life cycles. The Hyperledger Social Impact Group hopes that these blogs can create interest for:
· Focusing on clean air, water, soil, by increasing material collection efficiently and eliminating waste.
· Calculating product lifecycles for consumers and business materials.
· Analyzing political, economic, social, and practical blockchain applications.
· Building proof-of-concept applications to demo for stakeholders.
If you want to be part of the discussion or, even better, help build solutions that reduce the impact of hazardous materials disposal, please check out the Hyperledger Social Impact SIG new member center. Or subscribe to the Social Impact SIG mailing list for updates and meeting notifications.
Leaders from Trade Finance, Capital Markets, Climate Action and Accounting, Media and Entertainment, Public Sector, Social Impact, Supply Chain and Telecom Special Interest Groups; Identity, Learning Materials and Development, Performance & Scale and Learning Materials Development Working Groups; and the Italian, Latin America and India Chapters agree:
“We are unearthing ways in which we can better collaborate to overcome today’s and future cross industry challenges by identifying and contributing heterogeneous expertise, leveraging technology for the betterment of society, unifying open communities under Hyperledger.”
Signatories:
Why?
The Hyperledger Special Interest Groups (SIGs) were initially focused on specific business areas such as Trade Finance (TF), Supply Chain (SC), Healthcare (H), Telecom (T), and Capital Markets (CM). These groups evolved separately and went through their own independent cycles of growth. These SIGs regularly hosted presentations about ways their industries and business domains leveraged open source protocols and software to deliver solutions that overcame their respective challenges.
Gradually, some individual SIGs came together organically and dynamically. In 2020, the Capital Markets SIG and Trade Finance SIG produced an exhaustive and comprehensive picture of the Chinese blockchain infrastructure for Trade and Trade Finance.
In March 2021, Trade Finance SIG and Capital Markets SIG met formally for the very first time to plan collaboration in earnest. That meeting sparked an inner debate within the Trade Finance SIG about how different SIGs in the Hyperledger ecosystem could further collaborate. Perhaps it is natural that large-scale collaboration started with trade finance as, thanks to its hybrid nature, it is intimately connected with many other branches of human activity.
Observations emerged from these initial meetings within the Trade Finance SIG and from initial collaboration with other Hyperledger SIGs that could serve as a role model for future and further open engagement throughout the Hyperledger SIGs.
It became clear that we cannot promote decentralization while locking ourselves in silos. We cannot promote decentralization while imposing singular perspectives on the world. We need collaboration, open communication, and strong connections among Hyperledger communities as we look for solutions to enable interoperability and standards at business and technical levels.
The Hyperledger communities should focus on finding new opportunities that support global adoption of blockchain. Intra WGs, SIGs and Chapters collaboration is a natural step forward identifying opportunities to accelerate that adoption. The goal is to discuss, create or adopt technical, business, legal and regulatory standards that may redefine common global practices for a harmonized worldwide adoption and come up with a set of shared, mutually accepted regulatory framework for the industries to innovate.
Blockchain-based ecosystems are virtual places where members come together to be part of an evolution or indeed a revolution in business practices. Hyperledger has always strived to be a neutral reference point that leverages the expertise of their participants.
We face global events that stimulate or accelerate technological advancements and the need for solutions to resolve some of the world’s most urgent problems—from climate change and sustainability, green initiatives including green trade and logistics, healthcare, provenance, security and privacy. We are uniquely positioned to break the silos and combine our thoughts, ideas and effort in a concerted way to solve these problems.
The creation of a Hyperledger Collaboration Working Group will break the silos through intentional collaboration starting a convergence of the Hyperledger ecosystem addressing large-scale real world problems. This new Working Group echoes the goal of the Linux Foundation itself: “Unlocking the value of shared technology.” Representatives from these groups will meet on a quarterly basis to achieve the goal of open collaboration.
Our Call to Action is for you to participate, get involved, contribute where you can and help us achieve our goal. We encourage the community to roll up its collective sleeves and take on this challenge. A good place to start is the event named “Breaking the silos” that will take place on June 15th.
The Hyperledger Climate Action & Accounting Special Interest Group (CA2SIG) is part of a growing ecosystem of innovators that is working to make global climate accounting a reality. We are an Open Source group working with a community of talented professionals that are tackling the technologies, frameworks, standards, partnerships, and use cases it will take to get there. With the support and know-how from community members such as the Linux Foundation, Open Earth Foundation and Climate Chain Coalition, we are making good progress, but we need your help. Whether you are a blockchain developer, product manager, research, analyst or subject matter expert in policy, environment, industry, etc., there is a role for you to play. We invite you to join us and take part in catalysing the most radical collaborative movement in human history, one that will help facilitate the investment of $50 trillion dollars over the next 30 years to secure the future of humanity.
Here are a five ways you can get involved:
Join the Standards Working Group to help design and implement the “protocols and standards” needed to ensure that climate accounting data can function as part of a global interoperable layer of information sharing. This group is actively looking for real use cases to design for and test against.
Join the Consumer Disclosure Working Group to create solutions to help make consumers aware of the environmental impact they make in their daily lives. This group is currently developing a data-driven sustainability score for companies and consumers to help quantify how sustainable a product really is. This group is actively looking for a company or companies to partners with to develop a real world proof of concept.
Join the Operating System for Climate Action to help build tools to record emissions (right now from energy data from utility bills) and allow emissions and offsets to be tokenized and traded. This group is also working to build a Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) to allow users to vote collectively on climate action. (Read more about this effort here: Help Us Scale Up Our Operating System for Climate Action.)
Take a leadership role by taking on one of the blockchain projects listed on the Project Ideas Board. The Climate Action & Accounting SIG and Hyperledger Labs are here to provide support to help you launch any new project. Take a moment to explore some of the projects that are waiting for leadership:
Finally, if you have your own idea for an Open Source climate project, click here to share it with us, and we can work with you to explore how we can help you find the support and expertise you need to get started.
Given that Hyperledger Cactus is a framework to make it easier to create and maintain software that operates across different distributed ledgers, maintainer Peter Somogyvari decided to evaluate what we could do to help. Peter discovered the potential for Cactus to make it easier for the CA2 SIG to perform their important work on the carbon accounting tool. We then put into motion the following three-step action plan:
Create a full-fledged, end-to-end example application for our documentation that will mirror the existing carbon accounting tool, but built on top of Hyperledger Cactus.
This will familiarize us with the carbon accounting tool on a code level and highlight potential feature gaps of Hyperledger Cactus itself.
Organize discovery sessions with the maintainers of the carbon accounting tool at the CA2 SIG to see where and how we can add value by potentially migrating some or all parts of the carbon accounting tool to use Hyperledger Cactus.
Produce a list of first issues that are specific to climate action and carbon accounting for the Hyperledger Cactus issue tracker.
How Can You Help?
As an open source community, Hyperledger relies on the active involvement of people like you. All are welcome and invited to help us use blockchain technology to address climate challenges by applying Cactus to the carbon accounting tool. To get started, take the following steps:
With your help, we hope to see these outcomes from our action plan:
Lead by example and by doing what we can.
Make the work on the carbon accounting tool easier/faster by leveraging Hyperledger Cactus.
Provide a way for people who wish to contribute to Hyperledger Cactus to help advance climate action by filtering our issue tracker’s contents through the GFI_Climate_Action_SIG label.
Our plan above should demonstrate that it is possible to apply blockchain technology for good.
Solving the existential crisis of climate change is not a zero sum game.
With the enormous challenge that climate change represents, Earth Day 2021 brings mixed feelings. On the one hand, we should all be encouraged by the growing commitments to climate action around the world. On the other hand, there is a huge amount of work to be done and there is the question about how much any one person can do to help.
As open source developers, we decided not to just sit and watch. Instead, we’re taking action where we can make the biggest impact. We are writing code and we invite you to join us!
Blockchain developers can get involved and help the Hyperledger Climate Action and Accounting Special Interest Group develop a carbon accounting tool that can answer questions such as: Can we trust the climate pledges made regularly by companies large and small? Are our cities really achieving their emissions targets? We invite you to help us use distributed ledger technology to solve some of these climate challenges.
We’re building a set of open source tools for an “operating system for climate action” in the blockchain-carbon-accounting lab. There are three key modules:
An immutable data channel built with Hyperledger Fabric to record emissions data, using energy data from utility bills and audited emissions factors from the EPA and EEA.
A tokens trading network built with the Ethereum ERC-1155 multi-token standard smart contracts that allow emissions and offsets to be tokenized and traded.
A Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) built with the Compound DAO to allow users to vote collectively on climate action.
We recently deployed the Hyperledger Fabric utility emissions and Ethereum emissions tokens networks into production to track and offset our own emissions.
Figure 1. Hyperledger Fabric Explorer shows the Fabric Network for Recording Emissions
Figure 2: An ERC-1155 token of actual emissions from a utility bill, tokenized using the Emissions Tokens Network deployed on xDai, an energy-efficient Ethereum Layer 2 network.
Figure 3: Details of the transactions of Emissions Token Network on xDai
Head to github to check out the code. You can see the network fully in action here:
Next, we plan to build a network that allows members to record and offset their emissions while validating carbon offsets through a DAO. As part of this project, we will be creating solutions to:
Improve trust in emissions accounting by using real data and verified emissions factors.
Validate carbon offsets efficiently through transparency and collective voting.
Allow smaller projects to earn carbon offsets by reducing cost.
Join our bi-weekly Peer Programming Zoom call for developers on Mondays at 9 AM US Pacific time (UTC-07:00 America/Los Angeles.) Please check the calendar for the next call.
This four-part series is aimed at using the open source and collaborative nature of blockchain to tackle issues plaguing human consumption and improving society for future generations. We hope that this series can invoke anyone to move quickly on use cases with high potential to improve social good.
From the food we eat to the clothing we purchase, we must maximize the value from every product, extend its lifecycle beyond single-use, and properly dispose of materials at its end of life. If not, polluted waters, contaminated soils, and toxic air will pollute the entire social fabric of society. In Part I (this piece), we discuss how the government can create markets for recycling contamination and rewards viablockchain, which will reduce consumer confusion and boost recycling participation. Part II focuses on using blockchain to track hazardous and toxic materials from the point of purchase to ensure proper handling to prevent fires, death, and pollution. Part III looks at government tax credits to expedite the adoption of recycling and composting programs by businesses and using blockchain to verify compliance, traceability, and program participation. Lastly, in Part IV we discuss Zero Waste initiatives that cities, businesses, and facilities can implement to reduce the carbon-footprint of their entire supply chains.
Part I Recycling Contamination and Tokenized Rewards
Golden Opportunity
Transforming waste to wealth represents a staggering $4.5 trillion USD in estimated economic opportunity, also known as the Circular Economy. But the barriers to prevent materials from entering our landfills and incinerators are huge. The amount of recyclables actually collected, processed, and sold back to market is frighteningly low and requires different solutions. Countries, states, and municipalities have implemented bans on single-use materials, and reuse models are becoming more widely adopted, but, for every person who reuses a product, hundreds more toss out valuable material. Our materials don’t always get recycled due to contamination. Indeed, blockchain and emerging technologies have the potential to deliver unmatched reverse supply chain transparency, provide contamination data, and distribute insights that were previously unknown.
Recycling Contamination
Do you know whether your local Material Recovery Facility (MRF) has the equipment to process the material you attempt to recycle? Do you know if there is a market for it? Do you know when a truckload of recyclables is rejected due to contamination and sent to disposal? Contamination can take on numerous meanings, but here we are specifically talking about putting materials that are not accepted in your local recycling program into your recycling bin or cart. Contamination is not just bad for the environment because it sends precious natural resources to waste. It also creates dangerous working conditions because workers must climb into heavy-machinery and remove the plastic bags, cords, and other tangled materials that jam and damage expensive sorting equipment. The scenario below provides greater detail.
Let’s assume Carol and several of her well intentioned neighbors place plastic bags, Styrofoam with leftovers inside, and #5 clamshell containers into the recycling cart simply because they have a recycling symbol. On social media she sees people recycling these items in the cities where they live, but she’s not quite sure whether she is recycling correctly at home. Even if she is unsure about an item, she tosses it into the bin trying to minimize waste. Unfortunately, if over 20% of the recycling load is contaminated with unacceptable materials, the entire load will likely be deemed “contaminated” when inspected at the MRF and the entire truckload will end up being rejected by the MRF and sent to a landfill or incinerator. Why? Because food contaminates the cardboard and paper when it is compacted in the truck, the plastic bag will cause the equipment to jam and put frontline workers in harms’ way, and the clamshells tend to have no buyer or secondary market.
Technology has the ability to transform the way we handle our materials. Cameras are being mounted on recycling trucks for safety purposes but also to identify contamination culprits. The data gathered from these images can be analyzed with computer vision models and alerts delivered directly to the resident to confirm whether they are recycling properly. This information can also be stored on a blockchain to not only track contamination but to confirm when Carol’s materials (or at least similar materials in that processing batch) are sold back to market and ultimately converted into new material. Delivering this clarity to Carol will boost the positive reinforcement of her efforts and encourage her to keep taking the appropriate actions. With her new knowledge, Carol can avoid plastic bags and instead head over to her local farmer’s market with her own reusable bags, while still recycling what should be recycled in her local program (aluminum cans, cardboard, paper, etc.).
1 Token for Proper Recycling, 2 for Sustainable Purchases, and 3 for Refusing to Purchase?
An example of the activity in a recycling system can be found here: How It Works: Recording Recycling Activity on the Blockchain. Tracking materials (such as cardboard and paper) without a UPC or QR code can be difficult . But, hypothetically, if you are properly recycling and not contaminating your cart, the municipality could deliver one token and then be reimbursed from companies selling recyclables in their jurisdiction. Companies such as Cryptocycle are securing recycling using blockchain. Blockchain can allow a consumer to track whether their product was processed at a MRF or was rejected and sent to disposal. Once it’s confirmed that the load has entered the MRF, then an estimate can be calculated based on the type of material that the consumer recycled and verified once the material is reprocessed or delivered to a recycling facility, validating the raw material savings. There are numerous companies utilizing blockchain in the recycling context, including KrpyC, Goodr, and RecycleGO, that utilize Hyperledger Fabric and other Hyperledger platforms to provide transparency and accountability throughout the reverse logistics networks.
Sustainable purchases could be rewarded with two tokens as they tackle the carbon footprint and plastic pollution problems stemming from human consumption at the source. Token rewards can also incent people to try reuse programs such as Loop, which decrease the carbon footprint of our materials by delivering needed products without extracting new resources. Likewise, adding a token reward model can help fuel efforts to get consumers to switch from plastic to reusable bottles for the good of their wallet, health, and the environment. Americans spent $31 billion on bottled water in one year. However, the Environmental Protection Agency found that $24 billion is needed to fix our water infrastructure, $7 billion less than we’re spending on bottled water. Tokens for making reusable bottle purchases could be exchanged for a free transit ride, park entry, or a discount at a local business.
Taking this to the next level raises an interesting question: how to verify when someone refuses to purchase a product because of its environmental impact. I mean, how can one get rewarded for “not” making a purchase? This is a difficult conundrum, and one retailers and brands would deplete their lobbying budgets to fight. However, it has the potential to distinguish the true eco-warriors from those trying to recycle our way out of it. We’ll revisit this topic later in the series.
But what about the fires, pollution, or death? Don’t worry, we’ll discuss hazardous and toxic materials in Part II of this series.
Want to be part of the effort to shape blockchain-based solutions and applications that address the greater social good? Then come get involved with the Hyperledger Social Impact Special Interest Group. All are welcome!
We would like to extend a very warm welcome to anybody and everybody interested in permissioned blockchains for both media (writ large) and entertainment. The launch of the Hyperledger Media & Entertainment Special Interest Group (ME-SIG) is designed to be maximally inclusive: we would like to the see the widest possible range of engineers, developers, in fact all manner of professionals, together with artists, academics, students, experts, and—of course—amateurs.
Here’s how to navigate our initial resources: following a recent, virtual meet-up in Los Angeles, the Media and Entertainment SIG has started to build a landing page on the HL Wiki where you’ll find links to our:
And other initiatives or aggregated info that will naturally grow over time.
In simple terms, the ME-SIG will be using decentralized, permissioned HL blockchains to discuss and build user-friendly apps that respond to the relative disorder of permissonless environments, where artists’ interests are significantly harder to safeguard.
Following comparative analyses of the technical challenges (and hypothetical solutions) facing filmmakers, musicians, novelists, poets, photojournalists, etc., these DLT apps/dapps will be created for content-creators and their publishers, irrespective of location or socioeconomic status. This implies a focus upon UX/UI concerns over command-line tools, all in the name of access and inclusivity.
The ME-SIG will focus on the application of Hyperledger DLTs to media-specific and entertainment use cases. Such activity will automatically foreground topics such as decentralized metadata, digital distribution, copyright protection, royalty payments, value chains, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), tokenized content, counterfeit reduction, and registered digital ownership. By logical extension, these same themes will lead to real-world scenarios or solutions for cinematic, literary, audiovisual, and photographic publishers, to name but four.
Following the established activities of the Social Impact and Trade Finance SIGs, the TME group can then hope to:
Collaborate with other core Hyperledger working groups and project in the areas of architecture
—performance and scalability identity —smart contracts —and integration
Build user-friendly DLT ME applications on Hyperledger, focusing on UX-UI goals over command-line tools alone, thus simplifying the workflow of Hyperledger Fabric—for easier adoption by both artists and arts-related communities
Research different protocols—to build standardization across different parties and projects
Identify related reference architectures (business/integration or technical/infrastructure)
Work with businesses and non-profit or NGO communities alike
Share stories of civic success, failure, opportunity, and challenge
Encourage the equal involvement of both early adopters and student newcomers, looking to examine careers beyond the (barely existent!) academic job market.
So what of an initial project? Here’s where we are keenest to involve colleagues and collaborators from outside the worlds of media and/or entertainment. Our initial proposal notes can be found here. It is increasingly revisited and reworked by members of the SIG. We’ve called it a “Distributed Media Curation Platform (DCP) on Hyperledger Fabric.” Please add to those notes with help, criticism, or constructive abuse! Community input is—and will remain—vital. The more we know about your desires and needs, the more a finished product will be useful for you.
The DCP will curate, document, and fairly manage media assets—eg., music, ebooks, photojournalism, gaming figures, digitized artworks, etc. on the blockchain. It will accurately establish the provenance of an asset (its past) and assure that the asset’s creators or rights holders are properly acknowledged and remunerated in the future. For this reason, the DCP is suitable for museums, galleries, labels, and publishers on one hand, while proving equally helpful to artists or content creators on the other. In both environments, the watchword will remain fairness. The following paragraphs outline a plan to build the DCP in a modular fashion, together with definitions of the relevant and manageable technologies.
Hyperledger Fabric 2.X
Fabtoken
NFT
ISCC
OCCP
vLEI
DAO/DAC
Custom UI and Player (PHP/JS, HTML/CSS).
Early curatorial enterprise on the blockchain was celebrated in 2017 by Consensys’ own Engineer of Societies, Simon de la Rouviere. In his overview of P2P distributed curation markets (DCMs), de la Rouviere quoted Umberto Eco’s equation of curation or list-making with culture itself.
The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.
The benefits offered by a blockchain DCP, de la Rouviere claimed, are not only decentralization and related systems of accountability. They also include the “the [cultural] wisdom of a crowd sharing at scale “ and micro-transactions or tokenized payments. Both will be addressed by the ME-SIG..
There are certainly lots of existing content aggregation tools, operating with human or artificial intelligence. Given, however, that DCPs rely on both the filtering of information and an attribution of value to those selected assets, AI is (thus far) less likely to to attribute lasting or accurate cultural worth to any resulting list than a known, human entity within a relatively small and permissioned environment. Culture is a profoundly human and abstract activity, revolving around what many blockchain/DCP scholars like to term a “Schelling (i.e., focal) point” of consideration. Some DCPs that have arisen around such foci are:
In all cases, a relatively small and specialized community creates worth in a permissioned or walled environment, within which individuals determine a value-system. We will move along the same lines, so please help to guide our passage—and inform us of your needs in the process. Then we can be sure of building something you will want and use!
Thanks for your attention!
David MacFadyen Professor, Comparative Literature / Musicology / Digital Humanities, UCLA https://www.davidmacfadyen.com
The Telecom Special Interest group in collaboration with the Linux Foundation’s LF Edge initiative has published a solution brief addressing the issues concerning the centralized ID and Access Management (IAM) in IoT Networks and introducing a distributed alternative using Hyperledger Fabric.
The ever-growing number of IoT devices means data vulnerability is an ongoing risk. Existing centralized IoT ecosystems have led to concerns about security, privacy, and data use. This solution brief shows that a decentralized ID and access management (DIAM) system for IoT devices provides the best solution for those concerns, and that Hyperledger offers the best technology for such a system.
The IoT is growing quickly. IDC predicts that by 2025 there will be 55.7 billion connected devices in the world. Scaling and securing a network of billions of IoT devices starts with a robust device. Data security also requires a strong access management framework that can integrate and interoperate with existing legacy systems. Each IoT device should carry a unique global identifier and have a profile that governs access to the device.
In this solution brief, we propose a decentralized approach to validate and verify the identity of IoT devices, data, and applications. In particular, we propose using two frameworks from the Linux Foundation: Hyperledger Fabric for the distributed ledger (DLT) and Hyperledger Indy for the decentralized device IDs. These two blockchain frameworks provide the core components to address end-to-end IoT device ID and access management (IAM).
The Problem: IoT Data Security
The ambitious IoT use cases including smart transport infer a massive volume of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-road communications that must be safeguarded to prevent malicious activity and malfunctions due to single points of failure.
The Solution: Decentralized Identity
IoT devices collect, handle, and act on data as proxies for a wide range of users, such as a human, a government agency, or a multinational enterprise. With tens of billions of IoT devices to be connected over the next few years, numerous IoT devices may represent a single person or institution in multiple roles. And IoT devices may play roles that no one has yet envisioned.
A decentralized ID management system removes the need for any central governing authority and makes way for new models of trust among organizations. All this provides more transparency, improves communications, and saves costs.
The solution is to use Hyperledger technology to create a trusted platform for a telecom ecosystem that can support IoT devices throughout their entire lifecycle and guarantee a flawless customer experience. The solution brief includes Reference Architecture and a high-level architecture view of the proof of concept (PoC) that IBM is working on with some enterprise clients. This PoC uses Hyperledger Fabric as described above.
Successful Implementations of Hyperledger-based IoT Networks
IBM and its partners have successfully developed several global supply-chain ecosystems using IoT devices, IoT network services, and Hyperledger blockchain software. Two examples of these implementations are Food Trust and TradeLens.
To learn more about the Hyperledger Telecom Special Interest Group, check out the group’s wiki and mailing list. If you have questions, comments or suggestions, feel free to post messages to the list. And you’re welcome to join any of the group’s upcoming calls to meet group members and learn how to get involved.
Acknowledgements
The Hyperledger Telecom Special Interest Group would like to thank the following people who contributed to this solution brief: Nima Afraz, David Boswell, Bret Michael Carpenter, Vinay Chaudhary, Dharmen Dhulla, Charlene Fu, Gordon Graham, Saurabh Malviya, Lam Duc Nguyen, Ahmad Sghaier Omar, Vipin Rathi, Bilal Saleh, Amandeep Singh, and Mathews Thomas.
Figure 1. Hyperledger Fabric Explorer shows the Fabric Network for Recording Emissions 
