Brief description of garbage disposal
The history of human civilization is, in a way, the history of garbage disposal, and many of the archaeological results have even been pulled out of the garbage, through which we know what once humans ate and what they used. The way human beings dispose of garbage is also a reflection of the current development of human civilization. In China 2,300 years ago, there were laws to follow regarding garbage disposal, such as the Book of Han - Treatise on the Five Elements: " The laws of the Shang dynasty stipulated that those who threw garbage on the road would be fined heavily." Law System and Annotation of Tang Dynasty: "Residents who throw rubbish in the street will be beaten by 60 large slabs, but not to pour water; officials who condone people throwing rubbish are guilty of the same crime as the people." In the Tang and Song Dynasties, the city's management level was also more developed, and garbage recycling and resale have even become one of the means of private wealth.
Mishandling of garbage was costly, with millions dying in medieval Europe as a result of massive epidemics, including the Black Plague, caused by poor municipal waste disposal systems, hand-dumped garbage and feces falling from windows. It was not until the second industrial revolution, when the relationship between garbage and bacteria was proven, that the disposal of domestic waste in Europe was on track.
Subsequently, the centralized treatment of garbage has become a consensus. The main means of treatment are recycling, landfill and incineration. Currently many countries still use landfill as the main method of garbage disposal, while the disadvantages of open landfill are increasingly presented to people, land occupation, groundwater pollution, the spread of disease, etc., the ecological disaster caused by landfill is shocking to the eyes. Waste disposal is increasingly becoming a world problem to be solved.
Based on the concept of "sustainable development", waste disposal is also more detailed, generally following the priority level: avoidance, reuse, recycling, energy recovery, and disposal. "Avoidance" is the first objective, followed by "recycling", which promotes the "resource" cycle, for example, the recycling of waste paper reduces wood consumption, the recycling of plastics reduces oil consumption, and more food waste in our lives becomes a raw material for composting, so that many countries have policies and mechanisms in place, etc., and most of the remaining waste after recycling continues to be tapped for its "energy properties" and is incinerated in incineration plants to generate electricity. The final residue is treated soundly and then landfilled.
Pain points of waste disposal in developing countries
Developed countries have benefited from years of civic education and policies and regulations to effectively complete the entire process of garbage disposal. For example, Japan is a model of garbage classification, and its strict and meticulous management, coupled with a high degree of public awareness of garbage disposal, makes it a world leader in the field of garbage classification. Government departments will do very detailed education on how to throw out garbage, including when to throw out garbage, where to throw out garbage, and other issues, and specify penalties. Its classification is even refined to the point where a plastic bottle has to be de-capped, de-packaged and de-contented before it can be put into a resource bin. (Of course, there are also many irresponsible developed countries that use waste export and transfer of pollutants to developing countries as their main means of waste disposal).
Many developing countries may be no worse off than developed countries in terms of "recycling, reusing", although this is often a passive activity: at the living-area garbage cans, scavengers or hobbyists quickly collect the recyclable portion of the garbage, and at the city landfill, professional scavengers again screen the high-value garbage for recycling. While it does not sound great, it completes 90% of the sorted recycling of recyclable waste.
Many people believe that garbage disposal is equivalent to garbage pickup, and since pickups can be completed, does the point of sorting garbage lose much of its meaning? Is that really the truth?
Previously we have mentioned that the whole process of waste disposal is: avoidance, reuse, recycling, energy recovery, and disposal. Recycling is only one part of the process, and no matter how thoroughly it is recycled, much of what remains is still unserviceable waste, accounting for roughly 50% to 80% of the total, which is predominantly landfilled in most developing countries, but which itself is an irresponsible practice of "transferring pollutants to the next generation".
In developed countries, waste incineration has been used to generate electricity instead of open landfills in recent decades, and because of the strict separation of waste and the fact that only dry waste is treated in their incineration power plants, which achieves a high burning value and generates higher profits, Japan's waste incineration power plants have even become "waste museums" that attract tourists. Although waste incineration has been developed for more than 70 years, and the harmless treatment of residues is also very mature, but nowadays it is still resisted in construction, and ignorant arguments such as "waste separation is environmental protection, waste incineration is ecological destruction" are endless, but people do not know that waste separation and recycling is only the first step of the entire industrial chain, and is also a prerequisite for waste incineration. The purpose of garbage classification is not simply for better recycling, but as a prerequisite for the entire industrial chain. The premise of efficient waste incineration for power generation is waste separation, which requires not only the completion of infrastructure, but also long-term, continuous education and dissemination.
Therefore, it is not the technology that is most lacking in developing countries, but rather the waste treatment education that has been going on for generations in developed countries, and its counterpart, the entire waste treatment industry chain. So the two major pain points of waste disposal in developing countries are: 1) civic education for waste disposal, and 2) standardization and industrialization of waste disposal.
How blockchain is currently involved in waste disposal
In July 2019, the "Shanghai Municipal Domestic Waste Management Regulations" was officially implemented, and domestic waste was classified according to the standards of "recyclables", "hazardous waste", "wet waste" and "dry waste", and the person who disposes of unclassified waste and waste not put into the designated bin was subject to the corresponding penalties. Subsequently, 46 cities across the country began a pilot project to fully implement a waste separation policy.
The year 2019 coincides with the explosion of blockchain application development, so many governments and enterprises have begun to try to solve the problem of garbage classification by using blockchain. For example, Hangzhou plans to build a blockchain ecosystem among different entities in the garbage sorting industry; Xiong'an New District launches a prototype garbage collection machine based on blockchain technology, which will reward garbage sorters with points that can be redeemed for household goods; Changsha county pilots a "blockchain + garbage sorting" model to open up the collection and transportation system for recyclables and hazardous waste; Qingdao builds a model street for garbage sorting based on blockchain technology, etc. Governments and institutions expect to establish a "blockchain + garbage separation" scenario and adopt an incentive mechanism to promote the active participation of the whole population in garbage separation, so as to foster the habit of garbage separation among citizens through long-term implementation.
Of course, there are international precedents for using blockchain technology to solve the problem of waste recycling and sorting, such as the "plastic bank" set up in Haiti in 2013 to encourage people to recycle waste plastic and other garbage. Recyclables can be exchanged for tokens in the plastic bank, can be exchanged for French currency, can also buy household goods in its stores. It also serves as a proof of credit for scavengers, helping them get services such as bank mortgages, and this model has become the development direction of many "blockchain + waste disposal".
How to solve problems in waste disposal through blockchain
I do not know if you have noticed that these solutions are basically aimed at recycling, or just recycling as a "pain point" in the industry, but as we have said before, recycling is not the current pain point in the waste disposal industry. Moreover, from the experience of developed countries, incentives do not completely solve the problem of waste separation, which is itself a responsibility and obligation of citizens, and purely profit-driven "passive recycling" not only leads to safety hazards (e.g. recovery of available resources from hazardous waste).
The education of garbage disposal is actually based on the government's compulsory policy, and garbage classification is also inevitably inspired by regulations before and after. However, the actual situation nowadays is that because the implementation of regulations is not in place, resulting in difficulties in the implementation of garbage classification, so put the cart before the horse, and the incentive program has become a solution to the problem of garbage classification of the "bun". And blockchain isn't actually the only solution in these incentive schemes, or the concept of the Token economy isn't actually played out in these incentive schemes.
The basic definition of the Token economy is to allow Token to guide human behavior, to drive Token holders through Token incentives and punishments, and to make them builders and maintainers of the project. In other words, the value of "integral" is fixed and lacking liquidity, while the value of "Token" is tied to the project and has liquidity, "Token" is a symbiosis of rights, obligations, penalties, mobility and other attributes.
At present, the market space for garbage classification and treatment has exceeded 20 billion yuan, in sharp contrast to the loose organization, complex business chain, lack of infrastructure and unified technical standards, this is the problem of industrial integration needs to be solved step by step, and it is obviously impossible to solve it overnight, so these problems can be solved step by step is not a simple Token, but a public chain with high TPS and high expansion.
As we all know, BigBang Core has been in the field of boiler energy saving since last year, through the combination of smart hardware and the main chain, quantifying trusted energy saving data and encrypting the up-chain storage, thus achieving a standard quantification of carbon emissions data. Although carbon emissions are also closely related to the waste disposal industry, in fact, before that, the team has written about the incentives for waste recycling, intelligent hardware research and development, and even once expected to manage the recycling of packaging and plastic products through RFID directly from the source. However, through continuous research, we have found the real pain point in the waste disposal industry, as explained in the previous article, so we also understand better that the public chain may be the key to further integration of this industry.
Based on the public chain, we can link up several parties, such as waste producers, disposers, policy makers and those with vested interests, to form an industry integration on the chain, and establish a decentralized and transparent information database based on the non-tampering and traceability characteristics of the data on the chain, so as to realize the refined management of waste disposal and establish a highly reliable data platform for waste disposal.
Through this platform, we can effectively monitor the garbage disposal process and the efficiency of the residents' classification, examine the main body of sewage, and monitor the harmful substances (such as dioxins) in the incineration power plant, so as to realize the symbiosis of strong regulation and marketization, and at the same time, we can mobilize the whole society to participate in the garbage disposal, and on this basis, Token/Coin will not only be the embodiment of the value of garbage recycling, but also the connotation of Token will be amplified, and the "behavior" will be directly linked to the "value". For example, in a simple incentive mechanism, the sorting of non-recyclable waste does not actually generate a direct benefit, and the "incentive" may be a product of government subsidies. However, in the blockchain system, the classification behavior may be able to clearly correspond to the energy value of waste combustion after classification and the cost of final pollutant treatment, which in turn can be compared with the data to form a "classification level".
Of course, the difficulty of this complex process is not only the business integration and business architecture, but also put forward higher requirements for the underlying public chain, because it is developed for the Internet of Things, so in order to meet the growing business lines of the Internet of Things, BigBang Core developed the "secure main chain + multiple application branch chain" tree block structure, which can also effectively solve the problems of multi-body expansion and high concurrency in waste disposal business. The uplink of massive amounts of data will also move quickly in the development of the storage layer that we are perfecting, and BigBang Core will perhaps have a unique advantage on this track.
The development of garbage disposal is not destined to be successful. From Shanghai's mandatory garbage classification, to China's announcement of its refusal to import foreign garbage, which is besieged by the world's garbage, to marine life, which is threatened by the global garbage, the topic of garbage disposal has stung people time and again, and the importance of garbage disposal has become higher. It is believed that with the help of blockchain, the industry will undergo some landmark changes. Technology may not solve all the problems, but it can definitely make the industry develop in a better direction.
