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EcoBuild: Scaling a Serverless C&D Waste Marketplace on AWS Lambda and DynamoDB

EcoBuild: Scaling a Serverless C&D Waste Marketplace on AWS Lambda and DynamoDB

EcoBuild—It is a full-stack, serverless web application and Progressive Web App (PWA) designed to connect construction sites, demolition projects, and material buyers in a real-time, hyperlocal marketplace.

Construction and Demolition (C&D) waste accounts for a massive share of global solid waste, yet the ecosystem for recycling and reusing materials remains heavily fragmented and opaque. Contractors struggle with high disposal costs, and everyday homeowners doing renovation projects have no transparent way to buy affordable recycled aggregates or clear small batches of rubble.
To solve this, our team built EcoBuild—often described as the "Amazon for C&D waste." It is a full-stack, serverless web application and Progressive Web App (PWA) designed to connect construction sites, demolition projects, and material buyers in a real-time, hyperlocal marketplace.
In this post, we will walk through how we leveraged modern AWS cloud services and open-source tooling to bring EcoBuild to life.

The Architecture: Why Serverless?

We needed a decoupled architecture that offered zero idle compute costs, high scalability, and sub-millisecond data retrieval.
Our stack consists of:
  • Frontend: React.js / Vite (PWA) hosted on Vercel with custom caching headers.
  • API Routing: Amazon API Gateway.
  • Compute: AWS Lambda (Python 3.11).
  • Database: Amazon DynamoDB.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Serverless Framework ( serverless.yml ).
Plain text
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
|                      React PWA Frontend                     |
|                   (Hosted on Vercel Edge)                   |
+------------------------------+------------------------------+
                               | HTTPS / REST API
                               v
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
|               Amazon API Gateway (REST API)                 |
+------------------------------+------------------------------+
                               | Proxy Integration
                               v
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
|                AWS Lambda (Serverless Compute)              |
|                     (Python 3.11 Runtime)                   |
+------------------------------+------------------------------+
                               | Read / Write
                               v
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
|                 Amazon DynamoDB (NoSQL DB)                  |
|                   (Low-latency Core Table)                  |
+------------------------------+------------------------------+


Deep Dive into AWS Services

1. Amazon API Gateway: Secure REST Routing

API Gateway serves as the secure front door for our application. It handles incoming HTTP requests from our React frontend, manages CORS configurations, and acts as a reliable proxy routing traffic directly to our backend cloud functions.

2. AWS Lambda: Event-Driven Compute

All core business logic—such as processing new listings, validating user inputs, and managing logistics dispatches—runs on AWS Lambda using Python 3.11 handlers (e.g.,  process_listing.py ).
  • Why it worked well: The event-driven model means functions spin up instantly in milliseconds only when a user interacts with the app. There are no servers to provision, patch, or scale manually, giving us complete reliability with zero idle cost.

3. Amazon DynamoDB: High-Performance NoSQL Storage

To store real-time marketplace listings, user metadata, and dumper truck dispatch states, we utilized Amazon DynamoDB.
  • Why it worked well: DynamoDB delivered predictable, single-digit millisecond response times. Its flexible NoSQL document model allowed us to structure and query C&D waste records seamlessly without dealing with heavy relational migrations.

4. Serverless Framework: Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Managing our cloud topology was streamlined using the Serverless Framework. By defining our AWS Lambda functions, Python runtime dependencies, and API Gateway routes declaratively in our  serverless.yml  file, our entire backend infrastructure could be packaged, versioned, and deployed to AWS via a single command ( serverless deploy ).

Key Features Powered by Our Cloud Stack

  • Instant Marketplace Feed: Bypasses authentication friction so judges and users land immediately on an active feed of available C&D materials.
  • AI Waste Classification & Voice-to-Text: Client-side features backed by robust serverless endpoints that categorize waste types (concrete, steel, brick, timber) and allow hands-free listing dictation.
  • Hyperlocal Logistics Dispatch: An integrated dumper truck booking module that coordinates site cleanups instantly.

Conclusion

Building EcoBuild taught us the true power of cloud-native, serverless architectures. By letting AWS handle the heavy lifting of scaling, compute orchestration, and database management, our team could focus entirely on delivering a polished, impactful user experience.
You can check out our live application  here  and explore the open-source repository on  GitHub . Happy building!
# ai-for-bharat# ai-for-developers# amazon-api-gateway# amazon-dynamodb# amazon-s3
Any opinions in this article are those of the individual author and may not reflect the opinions of AWS.
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