GreenLink

GreenLink – Driving sustainability and social change with the use of blockchain

Are these chocolate really fair trade certified? How do I know this restaurant is really using responsibly-sourced seafood?

With a plethora of environmental and social problems today, a growing number of consumers are seeking out for more sustainable products that minimize negative impacts on people and the planet.

In March 2018, Starbucks faced criticism and mounting consumer pressure over whether its cups are made from sustainable or biodegradable materials — a petition with over 1 million signatures urging the coffee giant to honor the promise it made 10 years ago to develop recyclable cup. By July 2018, Starbucks announced that they are eliminating plastic straws from its stores worldwide by replacing them with fully recyclable sippy cups.This change will help eliminate more than 1 billion plastic straws globally per year.

Research also shows that many shoppers rely heavily on labels and certifications as a quick and easy way to identify more responsibly made products without having to become supply chain experts.

A report by Business and Sustainable Development Commission (BSDC) outlines how Asia will offer economic opportunities worth more than US$5 trillion by 2030 in the sustainability space, bringing momentous social and environmental benefits.

As sustainability goes mainstream, the number of different schemes and voluntary initiatives has grown exponentially in recent years. The Ecolabel Index, the largest global directory of ecolabels, currently lists over 460 labels in 25 different sectors.5 Most of these have emerged in the past two decades. But are they any good?

Transparency in our supply chains is no longer a choice but a corporate responsibility as the demand for fair trade, ethically sourced and sustainable materials continue to grow. Consumers know very little about the supply chain of the products that they consume as the products flow from producers to suppliers to retailers. Making informed purchasing decisions is difficult and few know how to actively support those working towards a world of sustainable trade. The status quo has problems such as lack of transparency and confidence in the information provided to consumers, plus consumers are unable to play an active role in shaping how businesses operate and ensuring higher standards of social responsibility.

Blockchain is shifting the relationship between consumer and business, as the former can now easily hold the latter accountable by interacting with the blockchain. Blockchain technology can be leveraged to decentralize trust in supply chains and bring measurable benefits and transparency of data across the public and private sectors, while at the same time encourage consumer participation in the supply chain. The distributed database holds records of digital certification data or events in a way that makes them tamper-resistant. While many users may access, inspect, or add to the data, they can’t change or delete it. The original information stays put, leaving a permanent and public information trail, or chain, of transactions for anyone around the world to verify.

GreenLink represents the digitization of certifications and relevant information about products and businesses in the sustainability space. Consumers can use the tokens in exchange for physical goods and services, provide feedback and ratings on sustainable businesses and obtain data about products via QR codes or a web interface. Businesses transact our token to create, access and validate data stored on the blockchain.

GreenLink is a Singapore-based technology company with over 3 years of track record and experience in the ethical and sustainability consumer space, having co-founded Boxgreen — a B-Corp certified, profitable and sustainable snack e-tailer that delivers healthier, portion-controlled snacks to homes and offices.

The GreenLink Protocol and its application solutions are currently being introduced and tested in the FMCG space. Future iterations will be designed to include more verticals such as beauty, fashion and/or the service industry. This initiative aims to ensure transparency, trust and reliability among the platform participants.

The Problem: A Fragmented Centralized System

The general problem is that certification schemes that currently exist within the framework of globalized production and consumption are built on a fragmented centralized system where complex and opaque supply chains often obscure relevant information while reducing the levels of external scrutiny.

The current methods of utilizing a centralized system for supply chain tracking does not provide consumers with data which relates to the manufacturing conditions the products were put through and even if they did, it raises a big question of how reliable the data is.

Lastly, although consumers clearly are becoming more socially and environmentally conscious, sustainable behavior is not adequately captured and only short-term incentives are awarded to consumers. Furthermore, even if these actions and behaviors are monitored, they are done so with a centralized system — maintained and accessible only by the respective businesses.

In summary, the problems stated above relates to three main issues:

1. Certification authenticity

2. Supply chain reliability — food safety/origins

3. Lack of action for green movements — incentivizing customers, the right thing is the profitable thing

The Solution: GreenLink Protocol

We propose building a blockchain-based protocol and ecosystem in the sustainability industry that enables the public to verify certification data, track the origin of products, and empowers participants to provide ratings and reviews on the products that they care deeply about. GreenLink is a robust framework that can cater to more wide-reaching future use cases. The Impact tokens (IMPACT) underpin the GreenLink Protocol functions, where these tokens are utilized for all economic transactions within the decentralized ecosystem.

Applications, where the GreenLink Protocol deliver value, are:

• Industry-wide certification process and tracking
• Charitable initiatives
• Self-propagating and sustainable loyalty programs established on brand quality and authenticity via a GreenLink rating system
• Dual-nature utility and transactional token for e-commerce

Businesses that honor transparency and safeguard sustainable standards will ultimately protect millions of workers, their communities and their local environments.

With the GreenLink Protocol, businesses not only meet regulatory requirements to minimize their social and environmental impact, but must do so in the public eye.

Why Blockchain?

Blockchain technology can be leveraged to decentralize trust in supply chains and bring measurable benefits and transparency of data across the public and private sectors, while at the same time encourage consumer participation in the supply chain. The distributed database holds records of digital certifications or events in a way that makes them tamper-resistant. While many users may access, inspect, or add to the data, they can’t change or delete it. The original information stays put, leaving a permanent and public information trail of transactions for anyone around the world to verify.

How Does GreenLink Protocol Work?

The GreenLink protocol is built to catalyse industry sustainability and tackle the main challenges plaguing transparency and certification standards in product supply chains. By leveraging on the blockchain, GreenLink aims to provide transparency throughout the supply chain by forming a backbone on which applications can be layered on, such as through the proof-of-certificate application, which allows consumers to partake in a new form of product verification process and enable businesses to be digitally certified on our platform.

The GreenLink Protocol will be built on Ethereum, with a native token, IMPACT — an ERC20 Ethereum token standard. The Protocol will function as an application bridge for use cases in sustainability to be layered on, forming a solid infrastructure to build a comprehensive ecosystem for certification, trust and consumer consensus. It will communicate with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) on behalf of any decentralized and centralized applications that tap into the GreenLink network. It will, therefore, become a gateway for other supply chain and technologies such as Internet-of-Things (IoT) to access smart contracts on the blockchain and introduce an incentive model to transact using IMPACT.

The GreenLink protocol can help businesses fulfill their duty to their consumers and workers worldwide, while also radically innovating their business models and protecting brand integrity.