"Driving the transition to a circular economy through blockchain technology: analysis and proposals for an applied model of industrial symbiosis"

In recent years, emergent digital technologies have created new opportunities to tackle sustainability challenges, especially by helping organizations to move towards a circular economy, which aims to close resource loops and extend the life-cycle of a product or service. With the increasing awareness towards the usage of resources, the concept of “industrial symbiosis” gains value. Industrial symbiosis represents a system of organizations where by-products are exchanged, and the outputs of a company represent potential inputs for another business. Among the last technological developments, a new digital tool can enhance industrial sustainability: blockchain technology. Blockchain is a shared and distributed ledger that allows to track tangible or intangible assets within a peer-to-peer network. Although blockchain is often associated with finance, the versatility of this technology makes it a reliable solution for many industries, such as logistics, healthcare, government, as well as sustainability. The main purpose of this thesis is to establish whether blockchain technology can be implemented into industrial symbiosis contexts and how, secondly, it can be integrated into the industrial symbiosis methodology of ENEA, the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development. By reviewing the academic literature, it was demonstrated that efforts in merging blockchain with industrial symbiosis are almost absent. For this reason, it has been decided to proceed by analogy and comparison with related themes that are better investigated in the scientific literature, such as Circular Economy, Waste Management, Supply Chain, Digital Transformations, and Industry 4.0. Lastly, in order to present a conceptual framework and an operative hypothetical scheme for integrating blockchain platform into industrial symbiosis ecosystem, the themes that have been previously examined separately will be combined together.