E-waste Inventorisation for Sustainable Smart Cities in India: A Cloud-based Framework

The expansion of the electronics market, increased demand, short cycles of innovation, cunning marketing gimmick and buying capacity of consumers; the lifespan of electronic items are reducing. End-of-Life (EoL), popularly known as e-waste has become a big environmental menace worldwide. Global e-waste generation reached 53.6 million metric tons in 2019 from 41.8 million metric tons in 2014. India generated about 3.28 million metric tons of e-waste in 2019. However, the generation data might not be the same in reality in a country like India. The e-waste data is calculated from the electronics sales data. In India, the sales data is not properly obtained as no proper record is maintained and hence rough estimations are carried out. With the rise of the e-commerce sector nearly 26 percent electronic items are sold online in India. While offline electronics sales can be estimated from the associated Goods and Sales Tax (GST) data. E-waste management in India has geared up in the last 5 years and it is an important aspect for sustainable smart cities. With India promoting a smart city mission and targeting to reach the SDGs, it important to develop a system that can record the online as well as offline sales data and contribute in creating an e-waste inventory. An e-waste inventory for any country will be beneficial for further analysis. In this study, we propose a cloud-based framework for keeping record of electronics item sales data primarily from the e-commerce sector as well as from offline sales. The developed framework will be helpful to the researcher and it is expected to be a prima-facie for developing national e-waste inventory for any country.