Enhancing Circular Bioeconomy using Distributed Ledger Technologies

In recent years, global sustainability challenges, such as world population growth and over-consumption of non-renewable resources, are pushing societies to establish and follow circular and regenerative approaches. Bioeconomy and circular economy can help to alleviate environmental problems caused by the lack of modern and smart waste management systems, which do not provide operational transparency, traceability, security and trusted data provenance features. In fact, today’s technologies leveraged for waste management, strictly relies on manual and centralized silos making them vulnerable and the single point of failure of the entire system. To meet the challenge, the transition plan must consider the necessity to integrate economic and environmental perspectives as well as stimulating social awareness and dialogue, leading to more conscious behaviors. Organic resources such as food wastes or biodegradable and compostable packaging, can be transformed into organic fertilizer or in organic gas that can be used as fuel. However, currently they are not optimally utilized. Waste resources are complex materials that are strongly varying in terms of composition, quantity and quality. To get high value-added bioproducts it is needed to ensure the quality of the inputs. In the thesis is reported how Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) could play a key role in enhancing the transformation process and provide important features that today’s digital infrastructures are missing. This would help the transition towards scalable and decentralized systems with the capability to offer the mentioned features. Finally, a proof-of-concept (PoC) based on the IOTA framework applied to a circular bioeconomy scenario is proposed.