Abstract
Electric and electronic equipment is the fastest-growing waste stream. These items contain many precious materials that can be recovered if they are properly recycled. Apart from recovering valuable finite materials, recycling also has economic and ecological benefits. However, the lack of reliable data and statistics on waste streams makes this process harder. Furthermore, the public does not fully trust the recycling process, and according to a survey done in this work, almost half (45.8\%) the public is afraid that their personal data will be abused. This increase in e-waste items combined with the mediocre recycling of it, creates many problems. In this work, a decentralised system is proposed that enables the efficient tracking of electronic devices, or waste items in general. A barcode is attached to an item and can be scanned at recycling points, adding the locations and timestamps to where an item was scanned. This is aimed to gain the public's trust and provide data for the industry. Due to the requirements of the system, the data is stored on a blockchain. Multiple implementations of blockchain are examined and finally, Tendermint, a blockchain consensus framework that uses a Byzantine-fault tolerant algorithm, is chosen. The blockchain system is evaluated on a four-node test network that has a transaction throughput of about 130 transactions per second which is sufficient for the use case. Furthermore, a 25 GB hard drive may store up to 1.1 billion transactions, which while making assumptions would last for about four years. The system is practical and while there are still flaws, it can be considered as a first step towards practical e-waste tracking.