Blockchain for Sustainable Supply Chains
Blockchain technology has great potential to disrupt the field of supply chain management by providing much-needed transparency, traceability, and efficiency toward sustainable supply chains. Supply chains tend, therefore, to be typically opaque, inefficient, and even harbor vices such as child labor and environmental degradation. For this reason, blockchain tackles these issues through a decentralized, tamper-proof ledger that tracks goods, materials, and transactions in real-time.
Additional benefits of blockchain include increased traceability: companies record each step of product processing-from material sourcing to delivering the finished product-on an immutable ledger. This helps verify the origin of and the sustainability of their materials. Their transparency supports compliance with the ethical sourcing practice and assurances of consumer trust.
Also, blockchain increases efficiency through process automatization, with reduced dependence on intermediaries. Smart contracts enable process efficiency to automatically trigger operations in cases of payment or inventory status updates if specific conditions are met, hence avoiding delays and errors.
Examples include IBM Food Trust, which tracks the origins of perishable produce to help eliminate waste, and Provenance, a blockchain project for verifying sourcing for ethical and sustainable products. In terms of sustainability, blockchain provides full trackability of carbon emissions, hence helping corporations to track-and hopefully reduce their ecological footprint.
By providing transparency, enhancing efficiency, and enabling ethics, blockchain is allowing sustainable supply chains to develop that benefit businesses, consumers, and the planet in support of the global shift toward responsible production and consumption.
~ Regards,
VEIGO (Community Mod)
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