What happens to an old laptop board in EcoEPR
By Vinit · Team EcoEPR · WeMakeDevs × AWS Environmental Hacks, Track 03 (Waste and Energy)
Over 90% of India's e-waste passes through informal collectors ( Down To Earth ), yet brands must meet their recycling targets through registered recyclers ( analysis by LKS ). The paper trail usually breaks at the collector's doorstep. Here's what EcoEPR does with one ordinary item, a dead laptop motherboard, using screens from our test runs.
1. The collector describes it, in Hindi
The operator photographs the board and records the collector. In one of our runs the collector said: "यह पुराना लैपटॉप का मदरबोर्ड है, चलता नहीं है। वजन लगभग 400 ग्राम है।" ("This is an old laptop motherboard, it does not work. Weight is approximately 400 grams.") Azure Speech transcribed it, and the model read the photo and the transcript together, returning each field with a confidence.
2. The server prices it
The model names materials and masses, but never a price. In another run, the assay found copper, tin solder, lead solder, plastics and resin. The server priced the metal at ₹119 from the rate card and subtracted the item class's ₹240 handling fee. It then floored the offer at ₹0 and explained why on screen. The brand's EPR credit for that item class was ₹2,450.
3. The gatekeeper checks it
The board passed as e-waste (CPCB class E2, IT and telecom) with 85% confidence. A photo of bananas, by contrast, is rejected under rule R-01 before anything is promised. If an item can't be settled automatically, it waits in a queue for an officer to decide.
4. It lands on the map
If the user has agreed to share location (the app asks first, because location is personal data under India's DPDP Act), the intake is filed to its district, or to its ward inside Mumbai. Four detections within 150 m in 21 days make a hotspot, and an operator can send a van there.
5. The handoff
At pickup, the load goes only to a recycler authorised for its waste stream. The collector's phone shows a one-time PIN, the gate weighs the load and types the PIN, and only then is a credit note issued and the simulated UPI payment sent. In this build, the handoff runs on a sample load of two lead-acid batteries, not the board from step 1.
Built on AWS
AWS Amplify Hosting serves the app, Amazon Cognito signs people in, Amazon RDS holds the records and Amazon S3 archives the evidence. API Gateway, Lambda and DynamoDB run the pickups, and a DynamoDB Stream triggers the payout.
What fought back
- Grid edges split real hotspots. Four intakes metres apart on either side of a grid edge counted as 2 + 2 and never made a hotspot. Clustering by distance (DBSCAN) fixed it.
- A deploy that looked like an empty city. The database URL was missing from the server's settings on Amplify. Nothing crashed: intakes were never filed and the map just stayed empty.
- A hydration error from the mouse. Moving the pointer while the page was still loading broke React hydration, because a cursor effect wrote onto server-rendered elements. Now effects only touch elements they render themselves.
Links: live site https://main.d1oj56ggqzeg50.amplifyapp.com/ · code github.com/chaudhary64/glowing-couscous
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