E-Waste Recycling Gets Smarter with Digitalization

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.