“By enabling the creation of a verifiable trip for a roaming entity (material, part, battery, vehicle, device, etc.) through its time-stamped location, MOBI Trusted Trip (MTT) can be integrated to track materials and carbon emissions in the supply chain.”

By Betul Kahya

Reducing vehicle emissions is critical to mitigate climate change given the increasing transportation demands of rising urban populations. It also plays an important role in achieving international climate action goals such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. 

In recent years, many vehicle and parts manufacturers have set targets to substantially reduce vehicle emissions. The majority of regulatory and industrial efforts for vehicle decarbonization have been geared towards reducing tailpipe emissions as 65%- 80% of vehicle emissions come from the tailpipe and emissions intensive fuel production processes. 

To this end, vehicle electrification and increasingly stringent fuel efficiency standards for internal combustion engine cars have been effective. Now, industry players are looking beyond the engine. There is increasing interest in reducing the material footprint in the vehicle supply chain, increasing resource efficiency in manufacturing, and rethinking the battery and vehicle end-of-life processes.  

With more fuel efficient vehicles on the road and increasing electric vehicle adoption, emissions from the use phase of the vehicle will gradually drop and materials emissions will make up the majority. McKinsey predicts that by 2040, material production emissions will make up 60% of life-cycle emissions. Meanwhile, the European Green Deal aims to curb carbon emissions by 55% by 2030. Vehicle and parts manufacturers need to adopt a new approach in order to achieve such ambitious climate goals and truly create a zero-carbon vehicle. They must redesign and innovate for sustainability in manufacturing, focusing on materials. 

Adopting low-carbon technologies and materials in addition to changing material flows may seem costly; however, some of these strategies can actually be more cost efficient than traditional methods. Electrifying manufacturing processes, switching to low carbon or green energy, increasing resource efficiency and use of recycled materials, as well as increasing recycling are relatively easier strategies that manufacturers can implement at cost-neutrality or cost savings. In fact, McKinsey projects that 97% of abatement can be cost neutral overall (see Figure below).

Major vehicle and parts manufacturers have already started to adopt the life-cycle approach to reduce vehicle emissions. In September, BMW announced its plan to reduce emissions across the life cycle of its vehicles by at least 40% by 2030 from 2019 levels, which includes an increase of the recycled and reusable materials used in manufacturing from 30% to 50%.

As vehicle manufacturers shift their focus to reduce supply chain related emissions, tracking emissions and material flows will be increasingly important. By enabling the creation of a verifiable trip for a roaming entity (material, part, battery, vehicle, device, etc.) through its time-stamped location, MOBI Trusted Trip (MTT) can be integrated to track materials and carbon emissions in the supply chain. Using blockchain as a trust anchor, MTT will enable more transparent, accurate, and tamper proof track and trace applications. 

The Citopia decentralized platform enables manufacturers and other stakeholders in the supply chain to integrate their own decentralized applications/platforms and utilize MTT and mobiNET core services to track and verify emissions. One example is Citopia partsTRAK — a platform integrated with Citopia — that enables tracking and tracing of physical assets and data in the supply chain via MTT. Currently under development, the first use case on the Citopia partsTRAK is EV Battery Track and Trace, which will focus on upstream and downstream traceability of EV battery packs and modules. Findings from this pilot will be applied to develop other use cases on the platform such as tracking emissions data and material flows.