Blockchain Environmental Asset Tracking System

Inspiration

As part of our university tour, we went to a materials recovery facility (MRF). There we were able to fully appreciate the process of recycling and the whole supply chain from a household trashbin to a manufacturing mill. We also talked to a couple of people at the MRF, where we learnt that there are certain hurdles and costs that can be avoided if a proper system is implemented.

What it does

The fact is, that there are brokers at every step of the way in the supply chain. The municipality has to pay these brokers to take the recyclables. After which the MRFs have to buy the recyclables from them. For the brokers, there is no cost price and are earning money from both parties. What if we can remove these brokers and streamline the whole process? BEATS aims to embed blockchain into the advanced recycling value chain to provide a fully traceable and accurately labelled record of recycled materials, from waste sourcing to use in new production streams. This will provide all the stakeholders in the recycling industry with visibility of the provenance and quality of the materials entering and exiting their facilities. Municipalities can create auctions and the MRFs can compete against themselves to get the best price. Which is gonna be cheaper than paying a broker. MRFs then themselves create auctions of their own to sell their bales to the manufacturing mills. Thus we thought of minting an ERC721 non-fungible token for every record of these bales, which will be transferred from one party to the other, and is gonna be traceable. So that in the end, we can also find out how much of the waste item is actually going into the landfills

How we built it

The backbone of the project is Ethereum, and for the auctions, we tried to use Axelar so that consumers with any cryptocurrency can do the dealing. For the front-end we used React and Firebase firestore and cloud functions for the backend. Authentication is also kind of a niche idea, in which we are not using any email or phone number for signing in to the user. Instead, we are using only the Metamask wallet. Whereupon signing a message(nonce) the user can be authenticated.

Challenges we ran into

Using Axelar was certainly the toughest challenge since we had little to no experience dealing with cross-chain communications. And we still could not fully implement it due to time constraints and the vision of the project.