Invizion Aims to Use a Blockchain Track Waste – Decrypt

In the end, someone will try to put virtually everything on a blockchain. Even garbage.

That’s exactly what Russ Lema and Daryl Taylor, co-founders of Invizion, are trying to do: Their Houston, Texas-based company tracks the movement of waste and garbage through blockchain technology. Why? They want to bring a greater sense of accountability to what we throw away.

“There is no ownership of trash,” Lema told Decrypt. “When you’re done using it, you throw it in a bag, you put it in a trash can and you set it on the street. You don’t care about it from there.”

Invizion, which recently presented its waste-tracking system at the United Nations Global Compact, at the 75th United Nations General Assembly, is emphatic that we see how much we discard. And with blockchain ledgers, they’re confident the data is virtually incorruptible.

The founder’s vision of Invizion

The two founders, while sharing a common vision, arrived at Invizion from different starting points. Taylor was introduced to blockchain technology during the Bitcoin gold rush of 2017. Yet unlike many who joined him in the speculative frenzy, he sensed that there was value to the technology beyond immediate profit. He stuck around after the bubble burst: “I learned from a mentor that if you do something just because of money, you’ll probably leave because of money. I had seen that year after year after year.”

The blockchain technology behind the mania intrigued Taylor. “That’s where I really started to do more research, and that’s sort of where through a mutual professional contact, I met my partner Russ Lema.”

Lema, raised by his grandparents, grew up around computers in a small town north of Lake Tahoe, California, where his graduating high school class numbered fifty kids. He fought seasonal California fires in his free time—long before they tinted skies an incandescent orange and destroyed billions in property damage as they did this past month.

“I started in blockchain back when you could still mine BTCs using a CPU,” said Lema. “That’s how far back I started in it.”

Invizion was the brainchild of their meeting—a company committed to transparency in its operation and tracking of data, with a focus on creating value beyond mere profit.

What’s under the hood

Under the hood, Invizion’s is both straightforward and—as blockchain technologies tend to be—very much a work in progress. Its objective is to track the life cycle of garbage from its disposal in bins outside our homes to its ultimate burial or conversion to green energy.

In the narrowest sense, Invizion is just a brain, a solo computational engine using blockchain. It hopes to bring a range of partners onto its system to transport trash, using retrofitted trucks that register weight…