E-Waste Recycling Gets Smarter with Digitalization
Nermeen Abou Baker, Jonas Stehr, Uwe Handmann
Abstract
Many of us have defective electrical devices in storerooms or drawers. Recycling electrical and electronic waste (E-waste) allows for reusing the original materials rather than mining new ones, especially if they are considered Rare Earth Elements. It is critical to separate and sort E-waste before recycling, which can be economically viable for products containing valuable metals and materials. Identification of the device and all related information will greatly support pre-dismantling. This work proposes a pipeline and automated system to identify the device using several techniques: artificial intelligence for device classification into device type, brand and model, multi-sensors for identifying internal components like Infrared or X-ray, a web crawler for creating image datasets using keywords from search engines, and a web scraper for retrieving device specifications, like dimensions, battery type, visual data, available colours, etc.