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Waste Woes: How Blockchain And An Enzyme Could Clean Up The Mess We're In

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When recycling is too expensive, could blockchain present an opportunity?

Mali Maeder

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, a long way from the sea, you can’t have escaped the attention plastic waste is getting.

Plastic microfibers, PET bottles and plastic build ups of all descriptions are making the news as we wake up to the damage the waste packaging is doing to our planet, the sea and polar ice.

The newfound awareness of this is no coincidence, either. We’ve been plunged into a low-level crisis about what to do with our plastic junk.

And the reason?

At the end of last year, China banned its importation of plastic waste. To date, China has banned twenty-four categories of waste as part of a crackdown cleaning up its environment and infamous Beijing haze.

And the figures are as eye-watering as the smog associated with it. China was taking in more than 30 million metric tonnes of waste from every corner of the globe including the EU and Australia.

About one million plastic PET bottles are sold each minute around the globe. As we know, these don’t naturally degrade very quickly. Somehow, they get into the food chain and become next year’s sushi.

Suddenly all the western waste exporters are scratching their heads wondering what they should be doing with their waste packaging.

Some cities in Australia, such as Ipswich, simply gave up, deciding to send their plastic into landfill sites instead. Others are waiting nervously before following suit.

"Since China has closed its doors to our waste, the effective cost increases to councils are 400 and 500 per cent — it's just not feasible that councils can sustain those losses,” Local Government Association of Queensland chief executive Greg Hallam said of the decision.

They simply can’t afford to process the junk without the resource of China’s cheap facilities. For them, sustainability isn’t profitable. While on the surface it makes sense to do the right thing for our planet, it’s not making economic cents.

Today, Ipswich City Council temporarily reversed its decision to send recycling to landfill, in response to public outrage. But a new enzyme might hold the key to solving this problem in the longer term.

Eating plastic

Just last week a team based in Portsmouth, UK have found an enzyme that could help eat PET (polyethylene terephthalate) which is the typical plastic used in water bottles.

The enzyme which was found on a dump in the Japanese port city of Sakai is a naturally occurring protein. It had  evolved to break PET down into its constituent parts. The team, led by Prof John McGeehan, set about enhancing the molecular structure of the enzyme so it could munch through its bottles even faster.

“What actually turned out was that we improved the enzyme, which was a bit of a shock,” says McGeehan, “It’s great and a real finding.”

Not only will it reduce the amount of plastic in the environment, it could reduce the need to find more fossil fuels as the output of the enzymes reaction with PET is oil. But chemically breaking down the waste is only one route.

The enzyme is still expensive to produce and one of the hurdles to be overcome is producing it on an industrial scale.

Charging for waste

The obvious fix for all our waste problems would be to start charging some kind of levy for removing a household’s waste. If that sounds a little draconian, you might like to know that Switzerland has been doing this for years.

In Switzerland, if you want to get rid of garbage you have to buy a taxed green bag for the purpose and put your garbage in there. If you don’t buy the right bag, no one will take it away, so you’re in effect forced to pay for the removal of your garbage.

You can’t simply fly tip your rubbish in a neighbor’s bin because they’re locked. So your waste costs you money, and the more waste you make the more you pay.

Can We Trust The Supply Chain?

Such a model might work inside the highly self-policed culture of Switzerland, but other countries might struggle to implement this.

In less law-abiding and affluent countries it could go a different way.

It's helpful to see waste removal in terms of supply chain management, and although you're not delivering a classic 'good' or merchandise, you could think of waste as a product that still needs delivering with an intact supply chain.

With the Swiss system of paid for bags, there’s always the risk that someone down the chain does exactly what we saw during the 2013 meat scandal. Namely, they corrupt the supply chain process with a cheaper substitution as a way of making an illicit profit.

In this case, they take a paid-for rubbish bag, save the costs of expensive repossessing and dump a taxed bag in the nearest sea or lake. But as in many supply chain situations, blockchain could help make sure the chain doesn’t get broken in a nefarious way.

The way the scheme would work would be like this: A householder buys a numbered green bag with a QR type serial code on it and scans it into an app on a smartphone. They then fill it with their week's garbage, before sealing it permanently and leaving it in their bin for collection. When the bin men come, they also do a quick scan to check the bag isn't a fake with a fake number. Thereafter the bag is in the system and stays in the system until the end where the bag is opened. A blockchain record is used through the whole chain to check that the bag does indeed turn up at the end of its proper intended journey.

If the bag doesn't turn up where it should, it won't be to difficult to see where the supply chain got broken, and someone can be held responsible. A missing bag would indicate someone is cheating the system.

Of course setting up a service of this scale poses some challenges, not least the problem of getting people to adopt the Swiss-style system of pay per bag of waste. But it’s worth asking, as the rubbish piles up in various lakes and rivers around the world, do we really have a choice?

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