Up-cycling e-Waste into Innovative Products through Social Enterprise

Abstract

Advances in information technology have brought about numerous benefits for many aspects of life. However, the increased pervasiveness of electronic devices has also resulted in significant amounts of e-waste. E-waste now extensively occupies scarce landfill resources and contributes to pollution due to the toxic and highly reactive materials used in construction. This paper describes a unique social enterprise business model that deals with the duel problem of social disadvantage and e-waste. Through building capacity across all sectors in the community, this case study shows how a social enterprise can improve societal outcomes through training and education, whilst also dramatically reducing the amount of e-waste going to landfill. Furthermore, in addition to recycling, this social enterprise model can work with relevant stakeholders to up-cycle e-waste into practical and environmentally conscious commercial products. The social enterprise model (with partner organisations) and spin-off projects have led to multiple individual and commercial successes. This paper provides an overview of how this social enterprise operates and some of the major projects that are underway using up-cycled e-waste.

Development of a Fuzzy Inference Based Solar Energy Controller for Smart Marine Water Monitoring

“…Therefore, the Lithium-ion battery (LIB) exposed to seawater or corroded by immersion is not suitable for marine buoys because its cobalt toxicity causes serious environmental pollution problems (Olivetti et al, 2017). Consequently, a number of authors have proposed to use seawater batteries (Cho et al, 2021;Ligaray et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2018;Hwang et al, 2019;Kim et al, 2021) or solar batteries (Przybysz et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2021;Trevathan and Sharp, 2020) for wireless marine buoy systems. However, as indicated in Cho et al (2021), Demirdelen et al (2019), there are some issues to be resolved when using those batteries as follows: 1) proper support charge during battery usage; 2) maintaining stable battery state by preventing overcharge and undercharge; 3) for lifetime or optimal replacement time estimations, the degradation progress in the battery needs to be reported.…”