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ReLoop: Building a Doorstep E-Waste Recycling Platform at the AWS Environmental Hacks, DTU

ReLoop: Building a Doorstep E-Waste Recycling Platform at the AWS Environmental Hacks, DTU

Almost every home has a drawer of dead phones, tangled chargers, and old laptops. Most people don’t throw them away because they know it’s wrong. They keep them because they don’t know where to take them. At the Environmental Hacks day of the Bharat Builds Tour at Delhi Technological University, I decided to work on that problem in the Waste & Energy track.

The idea

ReLoop connects citizens who have old electronics with collectors who can recycle them. Instead of searching for a drop-off point, a citizen lists the item and requests a pickup from home.
There are three roles:
  • Citizen: adds an old device, gets advice on what to do with it, requests a pickup, tracks it, and can find nearby facilities.
  • Collector: sees incoming requests on a dashboard and manages active pickups.
  • Admin: views an impact dashboard showing how much e-waste has been collected.

Designing first

Before writing code, I designed all 12 screens in Figma with a green eco theme, covering the landing page, login, the citizen flow, the collector flow, and the admin dashboard. Having the full flow on paper meant I could spend the build day on logic instead of deciding what to build next.

The tech stack

  • Backend: Spring Boot with PostgreSQL
  • Frontend: React with Vite
  • Deployment: AWS EC2
Before the event I did a practice run: I built a chess engine web app and deployed it on EC2 with nginx. That rehearsal made the real deployment much less scary, and I’d recommend it to anyone doing a “Ship It” hackathon.

A tip from an AWS mentor

At the DTU event, an AWS mentor heard my idea and pointed out the real challenge: scalability. Who actually does all these pickups?
His suggestion was to partner with Amazon so that Amazon delivery partners act as e-waste collectors. They already visit homes every day, and Amazon benefits from the recycling. I liked it enough to build it into ReLoop before submitting. I also added a credits/points system to reward citizens for handing in old products.

What I learned

  • Design the full user flow before coding.
  • Practice your deployment before the event, not during it.
  • Talking to mentors can change your product’s direction in minutes.
  • A working core flow beats a long feature list.

What’s next

  • Real partnerships with delivery networks and recyclers
  • Better tracking and impact analytics
Try it:  http://16.4.79.84/  | Code:  https://github.com/iJapmanSingh/ReLoop 
Any opinions in this article are those of the individual author and may not reflect the opinions of AWS.
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