Over the past years, blockchain has been deployed tremendously in many fields of activities: logistics, banking, retail...
Most large enterprises decided to go forth and use its powerful possibilities to ensure Smart contracts, safe processing and transactions or speculation. Among those large enterprises, FedEx, IBM, Siemens, HSBC proved themselves proficient and quite flexible regarding all possible business cases regarding blockchain technologies.

However, behind this huge potential lie some cons that must be spoken out loud. If blockchain is not necessarily bad for environment, companies should think twice before using it and keep it for large scale operations. Even so, for such usages, blockchain should remain used for few business cases because of its possible negative impact on environment. Here are some explanations about how blockchain can collide with environmental incentives:

- Blockchain does require much electricity. Outspoken critics point at cryptocurrencies actually. Why? Because they make the core of blockchain technology and "mining" such currencies involves huge amount of servers to mine (and "dig" cryptocurrencies") and maintain the system. On the one hand, mining needs computing power to deliver the proof of work (and thus vast amount of electricity), on the other hand, maintaining the system safe also needs massive energy. About 99% of the environmental impact come from the use of the mining equipment, with minimal contributions from production and recycling.

- Most of servers used for blockchain rely on fossil fuels. The location of the miners have the largest impact on the environment, with areas that use mostly fossil fuels for electricity, such as Inner Mongolia, China, contributing more to the carbon footprint than regions using renewable resources, such as Sichuan, China.‍

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However, blockchain is being used more and more for environmental projects and purposes. There is a silver lining, especially if cryptocurrencies are being set apart from other blockchain usecases:

• The so-called proof of work is being rethought these days, in order to promote a greener mindset (proof of stake for instance). It is important to remind that blockchain is also concerned about socially responsible projects, that is in the center of this proof of stake reform.
• Many environmental projects managed to emerge thanks to blockchain. For energy saving and eco-friendly businesses, have a look at:      
    - Brooklyn Microgrids    
    - PowerLedger      
    - PowerPeers
• Smart contracts to ensure sustainable legal structures for SME and bigger enterprises
• More and more socially sustainable models are pushed by blocakchain protagonists like Primavera de Filippi

To sum it up, it is quite hard to quantify the impact of blockchain on the environment. Depending on its usage, it can provide amazing breakthroughs or demonstrate a significant harmful impact on our planet.

This is why it should be used with frugality for best purposes in order to save energy consumption in the end.