SAP Green Tokens Tap Blockchain for improved transparency in plastic recycling

DIC Corporation, one of Japan’s leading fine chemicals producers, is launching a pilot project that seeks to use blockchain technology and crypto tokens to improve transparency in plastic recycling and help it meet its environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals.

The pilot will use SAP’s GreenToken and will allow DIC, which produces and sells polystyrene, but also special plastics, printing ink, compounds as well as bio-chemicals, to track raw materials along the supply chain.

The aim here is to gain greater visibility over the production and inspection processes, as well as gain access to critical information about the physical properties and quality of the recycled materials.

This will ultimately allow customers to know with certainty how much recycled material is in their products when using recycled plastic materials and will enable them to make better informed decisions.

The project, which is part of DIC’s ongoing food packaging recycling initiative, will also help the company “substantiate environmental claims,” ​​Yuji Morinaga, managing director and general manager of DIC’s packaging materials product division, said in a press release, helping to refute any doubts about greenwashing.

Chemical recycling is essential to accelerate the transition to a circular economy, and yet plastic from chemically recycled plastic waste is indistinguishable from plastic from conventional sources, said James Veale, GreenToken by SAP co-founder. This lack of transparency leaves room for misleading information and deception.

Just last month, a new report published by the Changing Markets Foundations (CMF) claims that large multinationals such as Coca-Cola and Unilever are misleading consumers by saying their plastic packaging is environmentally friendly.

“Our latest investigation reveals a number of misleading claims made by household names that consumers should be able to trust,” said George Harding-Rolls, head of campaigns at CMF, as quoted by the Guardian. “The industry is happy to enjoy the low-substance green credentials on the one hand, while continuing to perpetuate the plastic crisis on the other.”

For example, Perfetti Van Melle, the maker of Mentos mints, has made big claims about new cardboard spoon packaging, yet the company has failed to mention that the packaging is a recyclable composite material made of cardboard, aluminum and plastic. says the report.

Another example is Proctor and Gamble’s Head and Shoulders shampoo bottles, which are marketed as being made from “beach plastic” but are still colored blue, meaning they cannot be further recycled, it said.

Improving transparency in the supply chain

GreenToken is able to tackle these issues by using blockchain technology and tokenization to enable the visibility of one or more unique attributes, such as origin, circularity status or carbon footprint, of raw materials across global supply chain networks. These attributes are then recorded in a blockchain-based digital ledger, ultimately providing a fully auditable and immutable chain of custody for raw materials.

GreenToken by SAP dashboard, Source: GreenToken

Founded and developed in Asia Pacific and Japan as part of the SAP.io intrapreneurship startup program, GreenToken by SAP is one of the many blockchain projects that have emerged over the past couple of years to address transparency challenges in long and complex supply chains .

IBM, for example, has developed one of the largest blockchain-based agri-food platforms in the world, bringing together hundreds of growers, food manufacturers and retailers, including Dole, Nestlé, Walmart and Carrefour, on its IBM Food Trust platform for end-to-end food visibility on across global supply chains.

In the pharmaceutical industry, healthcare provider Zuellig Pharma has created a traceability solution called eZTracker. eZTracker tracks individual products and packages, and can be used in use cases such as real-time counterfeit detection and cold chain monitoring.

GreenToken’s partnership with DIC was unveiled just a few months after SAP inked a similar pilot project with Unilever to increase transparency in the global palm oil supply chain.

It followed a successful proof-of-concept in Indonesia where GreenToken was used to track, verify and report in near real-time the origin and journey that palm oil took throughout the supply chain.

Featured image credit: DIC