Special Interest Group

Intro

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 citizens via blockchain. 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.

Intro 

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 via blockchain, 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. 

Photo credit: Created by Housecodies

Scenario #1 – Carol’s Curbside Confusion 

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:

• Mailing list sign-up
• Rocket Chat channel (while we ponder the pros and cons of Slack)
• Proposed debut project
• 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: 

• Ocean Protocol — AI data pools
• Messari — crypto projects
• Civil — journalism
• MedCredits — doctors
• District0x — marketplaces

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 Hyperledger Social Impact SIG (SI-SIG) is a global community focused on how blockchain technology can be leveraged for a greater social impact. We are working together to identify use cases and opportunities, share feedback and lessons learned, and ensure blockchain is implemented where relevant and in a way that maximizes positive impact. 

Our SIG has put together several helpful resources to help new members find their way around. Our landing page gives a general overview of who we are and what we do. Those new to the SIG can visit the New Member Center to learn what we do and how they can participate. The Social Impact SIG Resource Center provides information on where to find resources for different sectors of the community, such as Financial Empowerment or Governance and Democracy. Our Community Presentations page is where you can find the latest discussion topics and presentations for our upcoming meetings as well as recordings and notes from past meetings. 

Since July 23, 2019, our meetings have been recorded and archived with the meeting notes, which makes them an excellent learning resource for new members and researchers alike. Highlights include talks by

• Christina Lomazzo from UNICEF presenting on the UNICEF Innovation Fund and projects that UNICEF national offices in Colombia and Afghanistan have developed leveraging blockchain technology; 
• Matthew Davie from microlending platform Kiva discussing how the Kiva protocol leverages blockchain to promote financial inclusion; 
• Shawn Wilborne, Lid Vizion cofounder and SIG member, sharing how his organization helps public and private sector organizations manage waste to reduce contamination; and 
• Tamara Dull of AWS presentingon how the Animal ID initiative enables their customers to track animals from birth to death.

If you would like to speak at a future SIG meeting, please reach out to us at the email list below.

We are excited to announce the launch of our blog post series “Social Impact Ecosystem,” which will feature blog posts from community members, guest writers and beyond on the various ways in which blockchain can be leveraged for social impact. The series will give members a chance to share what they are working on with others who are interested in our focus, and readers will be able to learn about different ways blockchain is being used to create positive changes in our world. Here is a quick glimpse of the blog posts that are in queue:

Shawn Wilborne will author a four-part series aimed at tackling the issues plaguing human consumption. From the food we eat to the clothing we purchase, we must maximize the value from every product and extend its lifecycle beyond single use. First, we’ll look at how blockchain can provide recycling and composting rewards to the masses to drive consumer adoption. Next, we’ll analyze hazardous and toxic materials to track them from the point of purchase through their proper disposal. This is vital to keeping our air, water, and soil free from contaminants that cause chronic diseases and shorten life spans. Then we’ll look at how the government can expedite the adoption of recycling and composting programs and use blockchain to verify accuracy, traceability, and program participation. Lastly, we’ll analyze how businesses and facilities can go Zero Waste and use blockchain to verify their entire supply chain. Cutting carbon not only benefits the environment and human health, but also increases brand recognition. We hope to inspire blockchain applications to preserve precious natural resources for future generations. 

Bobbi Muscara will share a series on how to develop a blockchain project to benefit your community. This will feature a series of guided checkpoints to help you identify the current needs of your community and how blockchain could be used to help.  

I will write a series addressing the varied ways blockchain is being leveraged in agriculture. While most readers will be familiar with the idea of using blockchain to track food along the supply chain to reduce food fraud and foodborne illness, there are a wide range of initiatives around the world that are focused on human rights and reducing human trafficking in our food and agriculture supply chains, environmental impact, and helping smallholder farmers and other producers access capital.

Would you like to add your project to our series? Would you like to present at a future meeting? Please reach out to social-impact-sig@lists.hyperledger.org to contribute. 

Get Involved! 

The SI-SIG is community driven. We are always looking for fellow social impacters to join our mission. To start, simply subscribe to the Hyperledger Social Impact SIG mailing list and introduce yourself and/or join our bi-weekly SI-SIG discussions every other Tuesday at 10:00am EST. Meeting details can be found here. Visit our Wiki page to learn more as well: https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/SISIG.

When looking at climate change, it seems like there are thousands of factors that need to be considered. The truth is, there is really just one: human collaboration. No matter if looking at behavior or trying to find a solution, human collaboration makes all the difference.

The question is how can we collaborate? How do we come together to work on a shared cause? How do we scale? How do we sustain the effort? 

There are many possible answers to these questions. In this article, we will explain what true collaboration looks like for us. We share the same vision, value each other, and each of us is solely here because of an intrinsic motivation: to tackle climate change. “We” are the Hyperledger Climate and Accounting (CA2) Special Interest Group (SIG).

CA2 SIG 

The CA2 SIG fosters and engages a multi-stakeholder network to exchange ideas, needs, and resources in order to develop and consolidate open source distributed ledger technology (DLT) solutions for common climate accounting mechanisms and frameworks. Our recent post Tackling Climate Change with Blockchain: An Urgent Need, Ready Opportunity and Call to Action provides more in-depth information about the CA2 SIG and our different working groups (WG).

One of the WGs to highlight in this blog post, which kicked off this summer, is the Carbon Accounting and Certification Working Group. The mission of this WG is to identify how DLTs could improve corporate or personal carbon accounting and make carbon accounting and certifications more open, transparent, and credible. By now, our first prototype is ready to calculate customers’ utility emissions according to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Scope 2 and store the emission records immutably to a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain.

Purpose-driven

Our vision is to build an open climate accounting system that covers all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. A system like this would make real trust and transparency possible for the first time. We are convinced that only then do we have a true shot at tackling climate change as a human society. 

In case you are still wondering why we invest our time in CA2 SIG: we take our spot in the bottom-up approach of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement and prevent irreversible damage to our planet if temperatures reach a 1.5 degree warming.

To drive our vision at a larger scale, the Carbon Accounting and Certification WG is taking part in the Open Climate Collabathon from November 9th to 23rd, 2020. 

The Open Climate Collabathon is an international open source initiative to establish a global platform for climate pledges, action tracking, carbon mitigation, and finance, that reflects the current state of planet Earth (i.e., temperature increase, resilience, etc.). The project focuses on leveraging emerging digital technologies like blockchain & distributed ledgers and other innovations to create a globally shared digital hub for coordinating a timely climate change response, internationally.

Collabathon = radical collaboration + hackathon

Our process

The Carbon Accounting and Certification WG does not just stand for a purpose-driven team but also a multicultural community of experts, students, developers, and climate activists. Together we worked toward the idea of multi-channel data architecture and created the Open Business Application Framework over an iterative process during the past year. The Open Business Application Framework is a generic model with a layered architecture that can be applied to many scenarios in climate space. Especially to projects that need a distributed ledger as a common data layer and want to benefit from the Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) (Hyperledger Indy) as well as the Verifiable Credentials (Hyperledger Aries) standards defined by the W3C.

What we do

With this idea, we joined the Open Climate Collabathon to lead a working group with two different tracks – technical and non-technical – during the two weeks sprint to get more people involved.

From the technical side, we concentrate our resources on the Common ID & Agents as well as the Common Data Layer and the interoperability between them. The first stream implements the Hyperledger Lab TrustID to the existing Hyperledger Fabric deployment. The TrustID project develops a chaincode and an SDK that, together, enable identity management in Hyperledger Fabric as a decentralized alternative to CAs by using the DID standard specified by the W3C. In a second stream, we move our local Hyperledger Fabric deployment to a distributed, multi-cloud Hyperledger Fabric network consisting of three independent organizations. The private permissioned ledger would just be one part of the Common Data Layer. In the future, we strive for interoperability between additional ledgers like Hyperledger Besu or Ethereum Mainnet. 

Last but not least – maybe even most importantly – what we do is not only technical but covers the business issues of using DLT for climate action. During a breakout session at the collabathon focused on the business issues, we came up with follow-up tasks such as:

• Explore how a Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) or digital currency could be used to motivate climate action.
• Find reliable emissions factors for energy in other countries beyond the USA.
• Develop a business plan for a virtual renewable energy network. This would allow members who can not get solar panels directly, because they rent, move frequently, or have houses that are not structurally eligible to get the benefits of renewable energy and offset their emissions as well.  
• Develop a business plan for energy efficiency with blockchain

Start collaborating

Of course, we are always looking for further collaborators. If you feel addressed by one of the tasks, are an expert in one of the areas or you just want to experience radical collaboration to make a difference, join us at:

• Hyperledger CA2 SIG | Carbon Accounting and Certification Working Group 
• Hyperledger CA2 SIG | Mailing List
• Open Climate Collabathon | Wiki Hyperledger Working Group
• Open Climate Collabathon | Discord Channel

We are looking forward to welcoming you.

If blockchain is really going to change the world, then why are so many of us stuck in pilot purgatory? Is it because our distributed ledgers are too disruptive to the existing incumbents? Or that they already have solutions that are good enough, at least for now, so breakthrough ideas like blockchain could wait on the back burner?  

Is there a large scale, urgent business problem out there that requires massive collaboration and does not have existing incumbents?

We believe there is one: Climate change.  

While we as a society recognize that climate change is real and have the technologies to fix it, we lack a way to get all the parts of our economy — businesses, investors and banks, consumers, and regulators — to work together on it.  Part of the problem is we have to work across traditional boundaries of industries and countries and integrate vast supply chains around the world. And we have to do it without recognized central authorities because they don’t exist at this point.  

Fortunately, blockchain, or distributed ledger technologies (DLT), may be just the right tool for this challenge: It is designed for coordinating trust and collaboration across multiple parties, with greater speed and much greater scale than ever before. With blockchain, we could record trusted Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions for every type of economic activity and transfer them across supply chains as products and services are transacted.

The Climate Action and Accounting Special Interest Group (CA2SIG) of the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project is an open source effort to foster a collaborative network of climate, DLT, and other emerging technology organizations (i.e., universities, NGOs, government, startups, corporations, multilateral development banks, etc.) that can create a center of gravity around the role of DLT and open source software to address challenges in the global climate action, policy and digital accounting space.  

We hope that our work could act as a shared initiative where participants can contribute value to and share explorations in the use of DLT alongside other emerging technologies such as IoT (Internet of Things), big data, and machine learning to address the challenge of keeping a transparent climate accounting system towards the climate targets set in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The CA2SIG is currently comprised of the following working groups:

Carbon Accounting and Certification Working Group, which is working on automating accounting and transactions of emissions:

Consumer Disclosure Working Group, which is working on ways of making customers aware, in a meaningful, understandable way, of the impact they bring about on the environment while going about their daily life:

Climate Accounting Standards and Protocols Working Group, which is focused particularly on the protocols and standards that will enable consistent climate accounting :

Together, these working groups are building software for the following goals:

• Implementing GHG emissions accounting using verified data and models, which could publish trusted emissions data for a wide variety of business activities.
• Passing GHG emissions up to national and supra-national structures.
• Making accurate GHG emissions available at the consumer level.

By making our work open source, we hope to enable more developers to build on our work and extend GHG accounting to every part of our economy around the world.  

What we’re asking is for people to help us integrate our software into more activities. Climate change is happening because every little thing that is happening is contributing to it just a tiny bit. We want to be able to get data on those activities, model their emissions, and start making people aware of their impact and work together to reduce emissions.  

Whether you’re an experienced developer, from the business side, or a private individual, we could use your help in linking real world activities to climate change and coming up with solutions together. Join us on the Hyperledger Wiki for more details and links to regular calls.