
Plastic has been produced and used on a large scale since the 1950s, which brought great convenience to people’s lives but also serious plastic leaching and pollution. Blockchain has been used for recording and improving the source-segregation of various waste plastic at the consumer stage, enabling an evidence-based choice of recyclable plastic by consumers at the retailing and purchasing stage and tracing plastic litters on street, each of which addresses only a single stage in the life cycle of plastic.
The main objective of this research is to improve the circularity of plastic materials and to minimize the leakage of plastic waste into natural environment by :
(1) integrating Blockchain and life cycle engineering (i.e. an engineering approach that design the product life cycle based on the life cycle assessment outcome; LCE) to improve the traceability of plastic materials and the transparency in quantifying and allocating social-economicenvironmental impact/benefits throughout the entire life cycle.
(2) (re)designing effective incenvitzation tools based on the Blockchain-LCE tool (hereinafter referred as PrecisePlastic tool) developed in this research.