Tackle the World’s Waste Problem — TrustNote

The world is drowning in ever-growing mounds of garbage. Food wastes and trashes are accumulating at such a rate that towns and cities are turning into garbage bins. Worldwide, waste generation is projected to double by 2025 according to the World Bank. Since China banned its importation of plastic waste last year, as the volume of waste continues to grow, western cities like Ipswich in Australia, simply gave up, deciding to send their plastic into landfill sites instead, many others are waiting nervously before following the suit, but it’s more difficult to find a place and put it all without polluting.

Simply put, the greatest issue facing the waste management industry is that there is too much waste to handle. So, are we stuck here? Do we have a sustainable solution to address today’s even greater waste disposal problem?

The most feasible way of combating this problem is to make better use of recycling, which would in turn reduce the amount of waste and landfills. However, increasing recycling rates is not easy because many times consumers are confused about what can be recycled and how to recycle it conveniently, and the consumers have little incentive to recycle, since the extra effort required to handpick, and deposit recyclables usually results in negligible or zero financial reward. When such incentives exist in the rare case, they tend to come in the form of container deposit fees that often being criticized as dead in the water.

Another major issue but often being neglected is that consumers diligently sort out recyclables from trash simply don’t know whether his handpicked recyclables will end up in recycling or not, it is also difficult to ensure that the fees waste management companies charge local governments to dispose of waste are accurately calculated. Such lack of accountability and visibility further disincentivizes recycling, making waste management a even more challenging task.

Without a solid waste management solution proper addressing all these issues, environmentally responsible cities cannot be sustained, and this is especially true for fast-growing cities in the developing world including China.

Last month in Hangzhou, the beautiful capital and most populous city of the Zhejiang Province in East China, TrustNote foundation signed a new “TrustNote Ecosystem Partnership Agreement” with a well-known local environmental technology company. In this partnership, the two parties will conduct in-depth cooperation to develop a scalable waste management system that will incentivize local citizens to participate more in waste collection, recycling, and provide improved accountability and visibility within the existing waste management network.

Hangzhou City, East China

In this initiative, local citizens who sort out recycles from his own trash will get rewarded with tokens when the recyclables are digitally identified with the DApp powered by TrustNote’s iToken platform. Each bag of recyclables will be uniquely identified, the IDs will be stored on the TrustNote network, local citizens can then track the movement of the recyclables using the same DApp knowing his/her efforts will really help protect the environment by getting it recycled in the proper way. The tokens earned via disposing recyclables can be used as a digital proof that allows the contributors to get discount in bills for renewable energy products, or products made from the recycled materials.

“Let every citizen understand the importance of the environmental protection by empowering them with a tool to see, to measure, and enjoy his own contribution throughout the whole waste management process, is the key to the success of today’s environmental protection program.” Said Jeff Zhou, Founder of the TrustNote foundation.

The tamper-resistant nature of identity data for recyclables stored on a public ledger, and token-based recycling rewards are important not just because they provide financial incentives for recycling similar to the container/bottle deposits available in developed countries, but also help motivates people for its increased accountability and visibility on the conversion from their own efforts on handpicking the recyclables all the way down to the increased willingness to buy products made of their own waste. Given that much of the world’s trash ends up in developing nations like China, tokenized recycling rewards can be a way to increase recycling rates and reducing the overall waste for the world.

“The core value of TrustNote’s iToken platform in this initiative, is to offer a scalable, and easy to use tokenized incentive system to not just reward people from recycling waste, but more importantly improve the quality of participation, and the quality of life for people participate in the recycling network. In future, TrustNote’s iToken platform will empower more innovative tokenized applications that can be applied to a large-scale, to better serve the need of the real economy.” Jeff concluded.