Breaking barriers on reuse of digital devices ensuring final recycling

Abstract

Digital Devices or Electric and Electronic Equip- ment (EEE) are scrapped at an alarming rate instead of being salvaged, fixed, and reused. For the reuse sector to flourish, donors, receivers, and reuse centers need services and technolo- gies to gain effectiveness, efficiency, and traceability to reach the goal of greatly extending the lifetime of devices and still ensuring their final recycling. The main challenges to overcome are access to sufficient good-quality used devices, quick prepa- ration of those with greatest potential for reuse, ability to make direct donations, guarantee that reused devices are eventually recycled, communication of the social and environmental value of reuse, establishing a system to reward donors, and ensuring commitment of receivers of reused devices to recycling. We present a set of open-source tools based on a distributed platform ecosystem that supports direct donation of devices. Devices are prepared for reuse in the donor’s location, and receivers collect them. Malicious users are discouraged by a reputation scheme to reward cooperative receivers that reuse devices and track them until disposed to recycling agents. This reduces costs, and minimizes EEE losses as there is no need for a central logistic system or centralizing the engagement of donors on charity projects. The background and foreground Intellectual Property follows an open model (unrestricted), as the goal is to bootstrap the reuse process, generate local efficiencies, guarantee final recycling, and ensure traceability. Pilots already performed for more than four years and two thousand devices validate the model with 80% traceability of device components.