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The progressing severe environmental pollution and dwindling nonrenewable resources force society to increase the reuse of electronic waste (e-waste) to ensure the availability of sufficient resources for future products and an environment worth living in. The constant growth and expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) and related smart devices amplifies the aforementioned problem, especially since a large amount of e-waste is either not disposed of correctly or hoarded at home. Thus, a solution is required to ease and incentivize the correct disposal of e-waste. While the growing number of smart devices increases the amount of e-waste, they also offer new technical opportunities to solve the very same problem they create. Instead of relying on the smart device owner to correctly dispose them at the recycling center, smart devices could arrange their delivery to the nearby recycling center themselves in a self-organized manner once they reach their end-of-life or are not used any further by the owner. This work introduces the Hitchhiker service platform that addresses the given problem of smart device e-waste. We outline the ecosystem and its stakeholders by following the Design Science Research approach. Moreover, we introduce the Hitchhiker system architecture for a self-adaptive disposal system of smart devices and explain selected system engagement processes. Finally, we discuss extensions of the service platform to support non-smart legacy devices that are not yet capable of organizing their own disposal logistics.
Lawrenz et al. (Sat,) studied this question.