Leveraging blockchain for sustainable supply chains: a qualitative approach for achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
Muhammad Shoaib, Shengzhong Zhang, Hassan Ali, Muhammad Sarfraz Ahmad, Muhammad Adeel Khan, Abdul Basit · International Journal of Logistics Research and Applications · 2025
The increasing complexity of the supply chain has made it difficult for companies to implement sustainable practices. Blockchain technology can help by enabling transactions without third-party involvement, ensuring secure and verified information. However, existing literature lacks a pragmatic perspective on how blockchain can help companies achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study aims to understand and analyze the importance of sustainability and blockchain’s potential in sustainable supply chains. The proposed qualitative study adopted the Deductive Template Analysis (DTA) and Theory-Driven Coding (TDC) approaches using semi-structured interviews with seven supply chain and blockchain experts. The result illustrates that blockchain provides ‘tracing and tracking’, which improves the supply chain sustainability and ‘enhances production’. It also improves ‘information sharing’ and ‘enhanced transparency and security’, making the ‘process streamlined’. However, the implementation of blockchain technology in sustainable supply chains faces challenges due to ‘privacy issues’, ‘lack of digitization and standardization’, ‘government regulation and legislation’, and ‘knowledge’. SDGs can help organisations ‘identify the root cause’, ‘product accessibility’, and achieve the ‘Triple Bottom Line (TBL) aspects’. Blockchain technology improves sustainability in supply chains by enhancing transparency, traceability, quality control, and recycling, aiding organisations in achieving SDGs through automation, information sharing, and fraud reduction. This study provides the taxonomy model, which allows industrial practitioners to adopt the blockchain in a sustainable supply chain. The beauty of qualitative research and thematic analysis will enable researchers to extract in-depth viewpoints from experts and provide a holistic view of blockchain adoption in sustainable supply chains.