Review of Blockchain-Enabled Construction Supply Chains for Transparency and Sustainability Outcomes

The construction industry faces persistent challenges of fragmentation, inefficiency, and opacity in its supply chains, resulting in significant risks related to cost overruns, corruption, waste generation, and unsustainable practices. Ensuring material traceability, accountability, and environmental compliance is increasingly critical as the sector confronts growing pressures to reduce its carbon footprint and align with global sustainability agendas. Blockchain technology, with its features of decentralization, immutability, and automated smart contracts, has emerged as a promising solution to address these challenges by enabling transparent and secure data exchange across diverse stakeholders. This critically examines the application of blockchain-enabled solutions in construction supply chains with a focus on transparency and sustainability outcomes. Drawing on peer-reviewed literature, industry reports, and case studies, the analysis explores blockchain applications in material provenance tracking, automated procurement and payment processes, circular economy facilitation, and carbon monitoring. Comparative insights highlight the effectiveness of blockchain in improving trust, efficiency, and accountability, while also identifying limitations related to scalability, interoperability, energy intensity, and adoption barriers. The findings indicate that blockchain adoption remains concentrated in pilot projects and technologically advanced regions, with limited empirical evidence from large-scale, real-world deployments. Integration with complementary digital tools such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Building Information Modeling (BIM), and artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a key trend to strengthen real-time monitoring and sustainability reporting. However, policy gaps, financial constraints, and knowledge shortages continue to hinder widespread adoption. This underscores the potential of blockchain to transform construction supply chains into transparent, efficient, and sustainable systems. It calls for coordinated efforts among policymakers, industry leaders, and researchers to establish global standards, foster collaboration, and develop incentives for blockchain-enabled sustainable construction practices.