Sustainability is a pressing need, as well as an engineering challenge, in the modern world. Developing smart technologies is a critical way to ensure that future manufacturing systems are sustainable. Blockchain is a next-generation development of information technology for realizing sustainability in businesses and industries. Much research on blockchain-empowered sustainable manufacturing in Industry 4.0 has been conducted from technical, commercial, organizational, and operational perspectives. This paper surveys how blockchain can overcome potential barriers to achieving sustainability from two perspectives, namely, the manufacturing system perspective and the product lifecycle management perspective. The survey first examines literature on these two perspectives, following which the state of research in blockchain-empowered sustainable manufacturing is presented, which sheds new light on urgent issues as part of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. We found that blockchain-empowered transformation of a sustainable manufacturing paradigm is still in an early stage of the hype phase, proceeding toward full adoption. The survey ends with a discussion of challenges regarding techniques, social barriers, standards, and regulations with respect to blockchain-empowered manufacturing applications. The paper concludes with a discussion of challenges and social barriers that blockchain technology must overcome to demonstrate its sustainability in industrial and business spheres. •The transparency characteristics enabled by blockchain shows promising for enhancing the sustainability of manufacturing networks.•Twelve metrics of adopting blockchain in the manufacturing sector have been concluded corresponding to nine blocks of the Business Model Canvas.•An overview of social barriers and the challenges of achieving sustainability goal in blockchain-empowered manufacturing applications have been presented.