Blockchain Technology Toward a Circular Economy: A Future Paradigm

Leveraging Industry 4.0 technologies plays a vital role and poses tremendous opportunities in achieving and elevating a circular economy (CE) to overcome the scarcity of resources on the planet along with the continuous population growth. As one of the disruptive technologies, blockchain technology (BCT) has been attracting public attention dramatically. With its evolution from generation 1.0 to generation 4.0 and beyond, BCT and its wide range of promising features and disruptive capabilities enable tailoring it across various sectors. In this chapter, we first demonstrate the driving forces, benefits, opportunities, limitations, barriers, and technical challenges toward a sustainable CE and propose solutions specifically by leveraging BCT and other disruptive technologies to foster a circular ecosystem. BCT adoption enables various parties to participate in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by managing, tracking, tracing, and verifying millions of transactions while extending transparency and facilitating traceability across the lifetime of products. In addition, we frame a mathematical model to investigate the impact of BCT on a sustainable circular economy and provide insights and implications to researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. Finally, a case study on RecycleGO for plastic recycling is included to illustrate the current impact and outlook of BCT for increasing the circularity of organizations by minimizing waste and reaching an optimal level.