Blockchain-based refurbishment certification system for enhancing the circular economy

Abstract

As the global population continues to grow, the enormous stress on our environment and resources is becoming impossible to ignore. A focus on producing and consuming as cheaply as possible has created an economy in which objects are briefly used and then discarded as waste, featuring a linear lifecycle that creates an enormous amount of waste. The alternative to the linear economy “take-make-waste” is called the “circular economy”. Under this paradigm, materials are recycled to build new products or components that are designed and built to promote their reuse and refurbishment. This assures the continuous (re-)exploitation of existing resources, reducing the extraction of new raw materials. However, customers often reject these reused or refurbished products under the suspicion that they do not meet the same usability, safety, or performance levels of new products. In this sense, trustworthy records of historical details of refurbished products could increase consumers’ confidence in products and components of the “circular economy”, prioritizing trustworthiness, reliability, and transparency. This work presents a new certification tool based on blockchain technology to guarantee trusted, accurate, transparent, and traceable lifecycle information of products and their components and to generate trustworthy certificates to probe refurbished product historical details. This tool aims to enhance refurbished product visibility by creating the basis for making the circular economy a reality in any domain.

Keywords

• Blockchain
• Traceability
• Lifecycle
• Product lifecycle management (PLM)
• Refurbishment
• Certification