Blockchain-enhanced trading systems for construction industry to control carbon emissions

The Kyoto Protocol established the emissions-trading system (ETS), which encourages carbon reductions through market mechanisms and has been implemented in a variety of industries. Despite its large admitted carbon emissions, the construction industry was not included in the embryo ETSs. Furthermore, the current generation of ETS in the construction industry focuses more on the operation phase, ignoring carbon emissions from the materialization phase, which consumes labor, energy, and carbon-intensive materials such as cement. This paper proposes an innovative type of ETS, which could also handle carbon emissions within the materialization phase of a typical project. Besides, the proposed system is also powered by blockchain technology under the industry 4.0 framework, i.e., decentralized, open, and autonomous. The proposed system consists of two interactive systems: Blockchain-enhanced construction product-trading system and Blockchain-enhanced emission-trading system. The structure and operations of these systems are described in detail. Moreover, smart contracts are used to boost the efficiency and dependability of the proposed system. The pseudo-code for implementing smart contracts is provided. Finally, multi-criteria analysis is used to evaluate the superiorities of the proposed systems. The results show that the proposed system has better emission reduction effect and policy acceptance over other ETSs. The average total score of the presented system is 7.8, which is 16.6%, 8.8%, and 21.5% higher than those of the traditional ETS for non-specific industries, Blockchain-enabled Reputation-based Emission-Trading Scheme, and the traditional ETS in the construction industry, respectively. [GRAPHICS]