German service centre provides low-carbon steel blockchain tracker
Stahlo, a group of German steel service centres, has come up with a product carbon footprint (PCF) demonstrator to substantially strengthen confidence in supply chains for low-carbon steels. The technological basis of its “Stahlo SteelGate” project is a blockchain application.
Stahlo has collected knowledge on the various approaches to creating carbon profiles for steel products in its database. This forms the basis for its classification label, which generally classifies the products according to the emissions produced and makes it easy for customers to compare them.
Information about the respective emissions generated is added at each stage of production and passed on along with the product. Users at the end of the supply chain thus have a complete set of information on the product carbon footprint of precisely the steel they have ordered, Stahlo says.
Thanks to highly secure cryptographic procedures, a blockchain protects such information
chains against unauthorised access. This is made possible by the decentralised distribution of the data records across many instances. “The steel manufacturer is one instance, the processor a second, and so on,” says chief executive Oliver Sonst, explaining the methodology to Kallanish. He highlights that this path is open and independent, which it would not be if offered from the side of a mill, for example.
The cryptographic chaining of the information blocks ensures that no manipulation is possible at any point. If one data record of a single instance were changed illegally, all the other distributed data records would automatically register this due to the cryptographic link, Stahlo claims.
Christian Koehl Germany
