Blockchain-based E-waste Management in 5G

Smart Communities
Amit Dua∗ , Member, IEEE, Akash Dutta† , Nishat Zaman‡ , Neeraj Kumar§ , Senior Member, IEEE
∗†‡
Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, BITS Pilani, Pilani, India
§
Computer Science & Engineering Department, Thapar University, Patiala (Punjab), India
E-mails: (∗ h20180119, † h20180126, ‡ amit.dua)@pilani.bits-pilani.ac.in; § neeraj.kumar@thapar.edu

Abstract—With our increasing reliance on technology, the electronic waste in the year 2016. Hence it is being predicted
amount of e-waste generated after their life cycle ends is that by the year 2021 this figure will rise up to 52.2 Mt [3].
increasing at an exponential rate. Going by this rate, we'll have
an equivalent amount of carbon footprint as the transportation India is regarded as one of the rapidly growing industry
industry, only by the smartphone segment by 2035. We can of electronic products in the world. Hence it contributes a
imagine the total carbon footprint if we extend this to all the other huge amount of produced e-waste towards the total e-waste
numerous electronic gadgets we use. With the increasing volume generated by Asia. Also the fact that many developed countries
of e-waste, the chances of these toxic non-biodegradable elements in order to solve their own problem of e-waste illegally export
polluting the environment are astronomical. This problem is
being addressed by various nations and laws to regulate the them to developing countries, like India, aggravating the e-
waste have been passed in recent years. The Indian Government waste problem of this country. The untrained and uneducated
has placed E-Waste (Management and Handling) Rules in 2011 workers engaged in separating and disassembling of the waste
which forms a part of the Environment Protection Act to ensure Electrical and Electronic Equipments (EEEs) [1] are lured
coherent disposal of e-waste. However, a rather large percentage by the probability of finding some precious metals in such
of e-waste in India is still not regulated and it runs vastly
by unorganized sectors. We provide a solution to the above electronic wastes and end up adversely affecting their health
problem by proposing an efficient e-waste management technique by following poor techniques during this improper recycling
by using blockchain in the 5G scenario. Our solution keeps process [4], [5]. The E-waste management (EWM) should
track of the e-waste generated and we provide an incentive-based involve the following steps:-
system where users are encouraged to channelize their e-waste
through government regulated agencies which efficiently dispose 1) Gathering of e-waste products from the consumers.
of them in an environment-friendly manner. We propose a public- 2) Classifying them into non-reusable and reusable items:
private partnership (PPP) model for implementing this, which
can generate thousands of jobs by organizing this unregulated a) The ones which are reusable can be kept for re-
sector with huge underlying potential. selling.
Index Terms—5G, blockchain, distributed ledger, e-waste, b) The remaining ones which are non-reusable can
smart contract be disassembled and its parts can be shredded and
separated multiple times to be treated as
I. I NTRODUCTION
• Reusable recycled products.
People adapting to a more tech-heavy lifestyle, and the rapid • Discarded off in a safe manner only after ade-
growth of electronics market with improved and affordable quate treatment of its harmful constituents.
products have led to the problem of e-waste management.
The situation is hence quite alarming and it is high time
Any discarded/non-functional household/business commodity,
to take some understandable and justifiable actions to solve
with electrical circuit components, driven by direct power or
this problem by enforcing management to follow the above
battery supplies, forms e-waste and the process of getting
mentioned EWM process strictly [2]. There has been much
rid of e-waste products in a way that environment is not
effort by well-meaning people and organizations to combat
harmed is called e-waste management which is becoming
this growing and dangerous problem but various issues have
more and more critical with each passing year [1]. Electronic
sprung up in order to do that [6]. These systems lack in the
products that usually get thrown in the bins could have been
following parameters:
repaired or re-used as long as they are in working condition,
thus increasing the amount of generated e-waste. As these • Transparency of collection and channelization of e-waste,
electronic products continue to pile up, they start constituting preventing stakeholders in adopting illegal ways to justify
a significant portion of the landfills [2]. They are more prone their collection targets and prevent their operating license
to leaking toxic chemicals or substances that cause various from getting revoked.
environmental hazards like the polluting of water supplies, the • Authenticity of the owner by providing proper documents
air and the ground itself. To get an idea of its impact we can of ownership.
take a look at a statistics which states: All the countries of • Accountability on the part of owners that they actually
the world together produced 44.7 Mt (Million metric tons) of deposited the e-waste as they claim.

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 • Tamper-proof record keeping to properly indicate the II. L ITERATURE R EVIEW
amount of actual e-waste produced and what part of it
reached the e-waste centre. Supply Chain Management is perceived as one of the most
• Incentives, which leads to consumers giving away their important and beneficial use cases in Blockchain technology,
electronic waste products to rag pickers for a small as it is the epitome for firms and industries in which goods
amount of money towards returning them back to the are taken through several stages, from producer/manufacturer
e-waste centres. to consumer. IBM and Walmart collaborated with each other
• Prevention of the leakage of e-waste into unorganized to initiate BFSA(Blockchain Food Safety Alliance) in China.
sectors, by asking the entities involved in the system This project was undertaken to enhance food tracking and
to deposit e-waste only at e-waste centres which are safety. China has proved to be an excellent place to execute
authorized by the government. any tests related to Blockchain technology since that is where
the world's first blockchain commodity based on agriculture
Most viable solution to this problem is the introduction of is housed. Several projects have made use of this powerful
blockchain into the e-waste management system. distributed ledger technology specifically in this particular
A portion of information, called a block, gets a digital domain, making use of it along with maritime logistics firms
signature assigned to it which is unique to it. Each new piece in order to enforce the concept of transparency into the
of information that follows is another block, which has its own inevitable bureaucracy present in International Trades. Being
signature. These connected blocks form a chain of information one of the largest Global shippers, Maersk first made use of
called the blockchain. blockchain. [9]
Specifically for the agricultural food domain, an idea has
To make it nearly impossible to corrupt, each new block
been presented by the authors of the article [9] which in-
stores the signature of the previous block [7]. This blockchain
troduces inventory transparency using IoT devices. The aim
system is also decentralized, which makes the editing and
was to discover the use of NFC and RFID based devices to
auditing belong not only to one person or a controlling
attain real-time information about the products with complete
organization but it to the users in the network, similar to a
transparency by setting up a centralized cloud database, di-
peer-to-peer control system. [8] How blockchain solves the
rectly in the area. However, the use of IoT and Blockchain
above mentioned problems?
technologies in the agricultural food domain is yet to be
1) Blockchain is capable of recording and securing every explored and it is worth exploring this field. The authors have
stage of e-waste management, from the point a manufac- also presented, a supply chain tracking system for safety of
turer produces an electronic product to the point when food, based on Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points
it reaches to an e-waste centre. It thus eventually boils (HACCP in short). It included description about various phases
down to accountability-where everyone has to pitch in of different crops like retailing and harvesting but did not
and be accountable as a whole. show any in-depth analysis of the performance. Raw materials
2) No discrepancy of actual ownership of the product when cannot be obtained, modified and delivered to the consumer
it is brought to an e-waste centre. This is because all or final user without Logistics. In Logistics Optimization
information about any electronic product is stored in the and Management, Blockchain proves to be one of the most
blockchain including all the transfers stating how the promising technologies available [3], [9].
product travelled from the hands of the manufacturer to The problems related to global waste management are nu-
the current owner/customer via some supplier, retailer merous - Excessive generation of wastes, landfill issue, toxicity
or another customer (second hand product purchase waste, increasing amount of plastic, waste mismanagement
3) Vital information such as the amount of electronic items etc. [10]–[17]Managing resources in an efficient manner and
produced, the amount of e-waste generated and part of minimizing wastage is not an easy task. The current recycling
it which got collected, and the stakeholders involved are management system is prone to cheating.
all saved in blockchain which promotes accountability. Technologies which power cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are
4) Bringing consumers, stakeholders and government agen- slowly making its way into waste management. Swacchcoin
cies on the same blockchain platform will eventually is a special blockchain-driven trial at managing wastes from
lead to improvement in supervision and transparency in households and firms and efficiently transforming them into
the entire e-waste management process due to the inher- products of high economic value. The Decentralized Au-
ent immutable and decentralized nature of blockchain. tonomous Organization(DAO) aims to create a completely
5) Penalizing the appropriate party whenever targets of e- sustainable, neat community evolution across the world and
waste collections are not met. at the same time enhancing the economic conditions of all
6) Providing incentives to stakeholders of the system when individuals associated formally with the firm in some capacity
they properly channelize their e-waste to the formal including the domestic households. The company employs
sectors and penalizing them when they try to derail various customized tools and technologies like SWATA(Big
the system will eventually reduce the supremacy of the Data), SWIOT(Internet of Things), SWAPP(Decentralized
unorganized sector [3]. App), Blockchain etc [18].

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 The Plastic Bank app is a fast and safe way to exchange entities will have a small token amount locked through the
plastic waste for currency. It's blockchain verified system smart contract. When the product reaches the e-waste center,
eliminated the need for cash transactions and empowers the the locked amount will be distributed along with a surplus
world's poor to support their families. People can interact with incentive amount to all the stakeholders involvedwith that
the app and find a shop near them. Digital coupons incentivize particular product. However, even if after the end of the life
the collection of low-value plastics and provide rewards such cycle of a product, it doesn't reach the e-waste center, the
as school tuition or products from the coupon sponsor. This token money will be forfeited. So this gives the participating
project is still in process. The country also needs to tackle its entities motivation to make sure the product reaches e-waste
domestic(generated within the country) and imported (dumped center after its usage.
into the country) e-waste. There has not been much noticeable From a commercial point of view, a public-private part-
amount of work done in the area of e-waste management [4]. nership can be forged to execute this plan of action. This
will generate numerous jobs and unify this huge unorganized
III. T HE P ROPOSED S OLUTION sector. The e-waste center efficiently recycles or disposes off
In this paper we suggest an incentive based model by which the items in an environment friendly manner.
proper tracking of the electronic product's disposal can be done
using blockchain to reduce the carbon footprint produced by
these e-wastes. Our model shown in fig. 1 comprises of five
entities which form an integral part of the e-waste management
system. We have taken into consideration the real life scenario
for any electronic product life cycle.
A. System Model

Fig. 2. Entities in our proposed E-waste Management System

B. Implementation
In order to implement this E-waste management system we
Fig. 1. Interaction among all entities and role of smart contract
have used the following technologies:
The product is manufactured and the product details are • Remix : It is a browser-based compiler and integrated

added by the manufacturer into blockchain network. The development environment (IDE) that facilitates one to
supplier buys the products from the manufacturer and the build Ethereum smart contracts with the help of Solid-
transfer in ownership is also logged. From the suppliers ity programming language. It also allows debugging of
various retailers carry forward the sales to the customers. The transactions initiated by calling of the functions present
customers might also plan to resale the product in second hand in the smart contract after it's deployment.
market. All these are inserted into the blockchain network • Ganache : It is used to create a personal/private Ethereum

for efficient tracking. Now after usage of the products the blockchain where the smart contracts can be deployed.
customer disposes it to the e-waste centers. Smart contracts • VS Code (Visual Studio Code): is a code editor used

are deployed in the e-waste module where some incentive in to develop the front-end of the dApp (decentralized
the form of ether is transferred to the accounts of all those application) to interact with the deployed smart contract.
involved with that product in a predefined ratio. This marks • MetaMask: is a browser extension that allows run-

the end of the product's life cycle. ning dApps by connecting it to the private Ethereum
Our objective is to make it exciting for all the customers, blockchain network created using ganache. It manages
retailers and manufacturers to complete the cycle from creating the Ethereum wallet of the user, which contains ethers,
the product to ensuring that it is disposed properly. We propose and allows the transfer and acceptance of ethers through
a cess or tax to be imposed by the government on the initial the dApp of interest.
product which will be used for giving the incentive later on. Our decentralized application is built using VS Code and
Also at the time of transfer of ownership of the products the is linked to a smart contract written in remix IDE and

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 Fig. 3. Sequence diagram of our proposed system

deployed on a private blockchain created using Ganache. indexed by a unique product id.
Users are created and assigned addresses linked with their 3) Track: Contains the details of each transfer taking place
metamask wallets. Next in this section, we will be presenting in this system. The details include previous owner name,
the implementation details of how the various participants of new owner name, and type of transfer (Manufacturer to
this e-waste management system (as discussed in the system Supplier / Supplier to Retailer / Retailer to Customer
model section) can interact. We are maintaining 3 prime data / Customer to Customer / Customer to e-waste centre)
structure. and the time of transfer. This is indexed by a unique
track id.
1) Participants: Contains the details like the user name,
The different processes that a user can execute on the dApp
password, type of user (Manufacturer, Supplier, Retailer,
of Ewaste management system are as follows:
Customer, e-waste Centre) of each participant of the
system. This structure is indexed by the user's Ethereum • Registration : Each of the entities who wish to be a
wallet address. part of this system needs to register itself on this dapp
2) Products: Contains the details about each product (name, website. This process internally involves calling of the
price, specifications, type, manufacturing date, manufac- createParticipant function of the e-waste smart contract
turer name, expiry date) added by all the manufacturers with the required details (username, password, user type)

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 as filled by them on the registration form and also the their current owners. He can also keep track of the products
user's metamask wallet address. On successful execution whose expiry dates are crossed but still have not reached the
of which a new entry gets created into the participants e-waste centre and can also notify it's the current owner about
data structure with these data. the product's status.
• Login : After a successful registration when the user tries Figure 3 represents the sequence diagram of the various
to login to this dapp website the validatelogin function of users of this e-waste management system and how they interact
smart contract gets called which checks the authenticity with the smart contract via the dapp linked to it. It also depicts
of the user based on its wallet address from metamask the various functions each type of user can invoke and what
and user name and password as supplied by them in the form of responses they get in return.
login form.
• Register Product : Only the entity with user type as IV. E VALUATION AND D ISCUSSION
Manufacturer has access to this feature by the help of We will discuss the critical aspects for our domain i.e.
which new products can be introduced in this system. integrity, availability, immutability, economics, feasibility and
It internally calls the addnewproduct function of smart security.
contract with all the required details filled in the add
new product form provided on the page. On successful A. Security
execution, a new record gets created in the products data In order to assess web security, web services security,
structure with the specified details. and the security of DISV system's central server, OWASP a
• Products Owned : Each user after successfully logging in non-profit organization was employed whose task is to offer
to the system can get a list of products currently owned unbiased and realistic information on security of applications
by them. to the developers and security professionals. It mainly fo-
• Transfer Product : The logged in user can initiate the cuses on crucial vulnerabilities of the web applications. Their
transfer of a product currently owned by them to another analysis of vulnerabilities detected ten most frequent attacks
user of the e-waste system. This is done by invoking the which are depicted in the figure[Fig 4] with the method to
initiateTransfer and lockAmount function of contract with combat the attacks. These requirements are integrated into the
the user's wallet address, wallet address of the recipient proposed system. However attackers are finding new methods
and time of transfer and product id. In this a certain everyday to exploit the vulnerabilities of the web apps and
amount of ethers gets deducted from the initiator's wallet hence preventing them entirely is not possible, but minimizing
and gets deposited into the contract which comes back to the potential damage or system hacking can be done. The
the initiator's wallet only after the corresponding product technology and architecture of the Ethereum with regards
reaches the e-waste centre at the end of product lifecycle. to the smart contract have some vulnerabilities. Attacks on
It also triggers an event to notify the recipient entity of the Ethereum blockchain [19]–[21] are mainly related to the
this initiated transfer. external calls but some other attacks are also present which
• Accept Transfer Request: When a user (having the re- targets particular functions to employ a loop in the smart
cipient wallet address as mentioned by some other user contract. Our proposed solution is considered to be highly
in their initiate transfer function) logs in to the system secure as it is using a private Blockchain.
gets a notification of transfers pending for him to accept.
On accepting a request the transferOwnership function of V. C ONCLUSION AND F UTURE W ORK
smart contract gets called and on successful execution of We have presented a robust, transparent and secure solution
which an entry into the track data structure gets created to manage the e-waste problem. Through the use of blockchain
with the details of this transfer. and smart contracts we automate the process of tracking a
• Give Incentive: This is invoked by the e-waste centre product till it reaches the e-waste center and then distribute
only after a product arrives at their centre. It is used the incentive among the entities participating in the chain.
to give away incentives to the entire chain of entities The novelty of this solution lies in the visualization of the big
involved in the process of transferring the product from picture. By incorporating a public-private partnership model
the manufacturer to it. Internally an incentivize function between the government and private players, we can have
of smart contract gets invoked which transfers the ade- a whole new sector replacing the currently unorganized one
quate amount of ether to the wallets linked to accounts comprising of unhygienic disposal methods by rag-pickers
of all those entities. It also returns the ethers of all the and kabbadiwalas(people who collect scrap materials). At the
entities that had got locked in the contract when they had current rate of electronic goods production, this can turn out to
initiated a transfer of that corresponding product. be a multi-billion dollar industry in a few years. The incentive
driven model will encourage more and more entities ranging
There is a special user called the admin who is the owner from manufacturers to retailers and customers to participate
of the smart contract that is the person who deployed it. The in this system. As a result numerous jobs will be created.
admin can view all the current products present in the system We can also segregate the e-waste further to select the items
and also track their transfers starting from the manufacturer to which can be reusable and we can have a resale market for

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 Fig. 4. Top ten OWASP Web Application Security Vulnerabilities

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