Irn Bru - Does a blockchain opportunity await?
When I was younger one of the past times of the local kids in the area was to go "Searching for Lucky's". This is a term used for jumping about hedges and parks looking for glass Irn Bru bottles so that you could take them to the local paper shop and trade them for 30p (or a pile of sweets that you would stash away from your parents). This tradition unfortunately died in 2015, which to be quite honest really upset me. This was a prime example of a Scottish company helping improve waste from their company, and in turn helping communities get involved and engaged on environmental matters. I have linked a guardian article explaining in general the reasons why this took place and the scheme stopped running below.
As with most things over the past years it easier for companies and cheaper for organisations to exploit the environment for a number of reasons. And I am not blaming Irn Bru here for keeping competitive within their industry, at the end of the day we all need that sweet taste on our lips.I do however think this is a prime example of how blockchain technology could be applied to help make this a more sustainable scheme.
An abundance of reasons can be formed for why this scheme stopped and whether it is a good or bad thing as they move towards using less glass, etc. I however would like to think that there is an opportunity to revamp this scheme. Imagine if every glass bottle had a number or code on a blockchain system? The amount of applications are huge!
We could see a huge amount of details about the contents, its ingredients, its sell by date and so much more. In turn streamlining the supply chain. It would also provide an opportunity for the buy back scheme to be monitored in a more transparent fashion. This would allow more investment and engagement from their customers for a start, but would also provide a baseline to find out exact amounts of bottles be recycled, how many times each bottle has been recycled, where there are clear issues in the supply chain and how much money is used on cleaning and transporting the bottles. All this in a legible transparent form would mean that grant applicaions and funding could be found to help this scheme as it is helping reduce damage to the environment in so many ways.
It would also act as a real world application for blockchain technologies to be utilized in Scotland and provide an example for others to see first hand the improvements from implementing blockchain technology into their organisations. It is obviously a big ask for a company to undertake, however the rewards in my opinion far outweigh the initial investments. This also shows an example of how utilizing blockchain technologies can improve an organisations corporate and social responsibilities. I hope you enjoyed a quick example of how in Scotland we could show them how it is done :) After all with the current state of the economy I will need to be out there finding glass bottles to pay my bills!