Blockchain: Wasted Design Futures?

Abstract

This paper explores how the implications of designing, or not designing, with blockchain technology for waste and other initiatives in the interests of socially responsible and sustainable futures. It describes existing problems in waste systems, while critiquing blockchain’s relations with broader global resource consumption and complex material-history conditions of blockchain and waste within sharing economy and decolonial discourses. Three cases of ‘blockchain and waste’ (AREP, Plastic Bank and SORT) are provided. Pathways for moving forward where communities, enabled through participatory design, might actively contribute to blockchain futures in managing waste are then discussed.