Mavennet Carbon Label

Mavennet Carbon Label Addresses Challenge 4, Open Challenge.

Inspiration

Consumer products have ingredient labels. A nutrition label on a food product will tell us ingredients and nutritional impact from carbs, fats and proteins. There are also concepts like certified organic products, which theoretically are better for our bodies.

But what about environmental impact? Is there a way for a consumer to know a specific product’s environmental impact? Specifically, the amount of CO2, CH4, N20 and other environmental impact factors throughout this product’s lifecycle? Not just during production, but the end-to-end lifecycle: production, processing, transportation, and storage.

Meet Mavennet Carbon Label

Opportunity

Today there is no credible way to describe a product’s end-to-end environmental impact, at least not in a way that help people and businesses make informed decisions about environmental impact of their own operations and enable trade-offs based not only on quality and price of products but also based on environmental footprint.

Today, emissions are measured at industrial facilities in aggregate and almost never quantified at the product level. Supply chain logistics accounts for a substantial portion of our carbon footprint (some estimates put this as high as 26% of the total footprint) and the path each shipment of products takes is meaningful to its end-to-end carbon footprint.

At the same time, governments around the world are starting to consider carbon border adjustments to prevent unfair advantages to import products from strict local environmental policies. Concepts like the European Battery Environmental Passport are starting to emerge, and will require quantifying environmental impact in the not-so-distant future.

What it does

Mavennet created a Carbon Label that relies on cryptographically secure, provable and portable Verifiable Credentials to quantify CO2 emissions across multiple events and parties in the lifecycle of a specific individual product.

For air cargo transportation, Carbon Label uses One Record to calculate flight CO2 and then compute each product’s relative portion of transportation carbon. We provide a real-time live view of lifecycle CO2 emissions for a specific product using an associated QR code, which points to a carbon passport visualizing a collection of Verifiable Credentials. Each Verifiable Credential can be issued by a different organization (producer, processing, transportation and other types of organizations) and quantifies environmental footprint at a specific event in the product’s lifecycle.

In the case of cargo transportation, we are showing airline act as an issuer of Verifiable Credentials that record specific environmental impact of transporting each product. The CO2 impact of a product for a trip is based on the fuel consumed, overall cargo load and the specific load of the product. Our approach provides a specific and accurate calculation of environmental impact of transportation – instead of averages, which benefit environmental delinquents - enabling environmentally responsible air cargo operators (such as Lufthansa and Air Canada) to create a differentiated service.

Look for the Carbon Label. The only way to reliably measure your real CO2 footprint.

How we built it

The application associates Decentralized Identifiers with Airlines, and airplanes (Transport Means in the ontology). This allows us to create claims by these entities that represent events in the supply chain. The application subscribes to notifications from the One Record API, around the topic of Transport Movements. When a movement occurs, the airplane signs a verifiable credential attesting to the details of the movement including arrival and destination locations, CO2 emissions and Pieces Transported. We also empower the Airline to calculate the emissions per piece and issues a verifiable credential attesting to that number. These credentials are stored in the DB and are exposed to the frontend. The app provides an endpoint to retrieve all credentials related to a piece, including the ability to show multiple transport movements and multiple emissions per movement.

The application is built using open source libraries and frameworks including:
•  W3C Verifiable Credentials https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/
•  W3C Decentralized Identifiers https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/
•  NestJS for the backend (Typescript) . https://docs.nestjs.com/
•  React minimal kit as a template for the frontend (Javascript). https://github.com/minimal-ui-kit/material-kit-react
•  MongoDB and MongoDB Atlas for the database

Challenges we ran into

•  While OneRecord API is very comprehensive, there are a number of areas that can benefit from further polish, documentation and refinement (e.g., as Notification and PubSub modules).
•  Given the timelines of the hackathon, it would be great to have sample data along with a hosted version of the API.
•  JSON LD ontology was provided in disparate contexts as opposed to single context, which complicated signing over the data.
•  No hosted version of the JSON LD context.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating a concept that is aimed at helping airline industry transition towards NetZero. We want to make it possible for organizations and individuals to quantify environmental impact of their operations, decisions, and purchases. Unit-level granularity and transportation emissions are key in our ability to reduce and optimize environmental impact. It is also important in creating a framework of incentives for meaningful improvements in environmental practices.

What's next for Mavennet Carbon Label

We are looking for a partner who interested in working with us on the concept to further develop, qualify and test it in a real environment.
Mavennet works with a number of leading Oil and Gas producers as part of its partnership with U.S. CBP (digital border clearance). It would be great to pilot quantifying emissions throughout the entire energy and transportation value chain, including embedded carbon from jet fuel (bio-fuels) and transportation emissions..