One of the major challenges facing companies today is accurately reporting their sustainability initiatives without engaging in greenwashing, that is, making false claims about how environmentally friendly they are. Accusations of greenwashing are now routinely made about practically every statement issued by a company on its strategies and sustainability measures.

To avoid this problem, which limits the company's capacity to faithfully report its activity, a graduate of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya's (UOC) University Master's Degree in Digital Innovation and Transformation has created Mintnature, a platform that uses blockchain, tokenization and artificial intelligence technologies to certify companies' sustainability initiatives.

"Mintnature is the result of years of directly observing and listening to event organizers who wanted to make progress in sustainability but were faced with complex, opaque processes that are difficult to explain credibly," said Julio Fernández de la Iglesia, the platform's founder. "We found that many organizations were willing to take action, but were unable to connect the dots between environmental offsetting, event attendees and the ability to truly demonstrate the impact generated."

Guaranteed sustainability

The Mintnature platform proposes a new way of managing corporate sustainability policies, with the aim of "making sustainability visible, verifiable and participatory," Fernández de la Iglesia said. Mintnature uses blockchain technology to guarantee the traceability and integrity of the company's climate offsetting information, and tokenization to transform this impact into digital assets that can be shared at events through what they call "EcoSeals", allowing the public to better understand the nature of each initiative. "Attendees receive not only a digital certificate, but also visible, easily understandable proof of how their participation contributes to a specific climate initiative," he said.

What's more, Mintnature uses artificial intelligence to automate reporting processes, allowing companies to generate reports they can seamlessly share with investors, partners and customers at a lower cost. "We believe that in the near future, verifiable sustainability will no longer be a differentiating factor for companies, but rather a basic market requirement," he said.

Conveying the facts

The panel of SpinUOC 2026, the Hubbik platform's competition to boost tech-based entrepreneurial initiatives designed by UOC students and alumni, selected Mintnature as a finalist, highlighting how enabling companies to faithfully report their sustainability work is a disruptive innovation. "Trust is built on a combination of transparency, consistency and the ability to back up what you're claiming," he said.

In this regard, Mintnature was created with a view to supporting the tourism industry, where sustainability policies are especially vulnerable due to the sector's strong ties to transport and, by extension, fossil fuels, and where there is a real need to better explain to society the positive changes that are being made. "One of the main challenges was to translate complex sustainability, carbon markets and traceability concepts into simple experiences within any user's grasp," he said.

So far, the platform has been trialled in real-world environments through a pilot developed in collaboration with the Spanish Society for Family and Community Medicine (semFYC), with the aim of validating Mintnature's technology and verifying its impact on the public. "Our vision is for Mintnature to become a climate trust resource ready for a new landscape of ever-greater integration between sustainability, automation and digital trust," said Fernández de la Iglesia, who sees the platform emerging as a solution "capable of connecting regulatory compliance, user experience and verifiable impact" so that "sustainability can go from being an abstract or invisible concept to become a real, transparent and shared experience".

This entrepreneurial project is aligned with the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): 11. Sustainable Cities and Communities; 12. Responsible Consumption and Production; and 13. Climate Action.

Transformative, impactful research

At the UOC, we see research as a strategic tool to advance towards a future society that is more critical, responsible and nonconformist. With this vision, we conduct applied research that's interdisciplinary and linked to the most important social, technological and educational challenges.

The UOC’s over 500 researchers and more than 50 research groups are working in five research units focusing on five missions: lifelong learning; ethical and human-centred technology; digital transition and sustainability; culture for a critical society, and digital health and planetary well-being.

The university's Hubbik platform fosters knowledge transfer and entrepreneurship in the UOC community.

More information: www.uoc.edu/en/research