E-Waste Detection and Collection assistance system

2021 IEEE International Conference on Computation System and Information Technology for Sustainable Solutions (CSITSS) | 978-1-6654-0610-9/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/CSITSS54238.2021.9682806

using YOLOv5
Risha Dassi Sakshi Kamal B Sathish Babu
Computer Science and Engineering Computer Science and Engineering Computer Science and Engineering
RV College of Engineering RV College of Engineering RV College of Engineering
Bangalore, India Bangalore, India Bangalore, India
rishadassi.cs18@rvce.edu.in rishadassi.cs18@rvce.edu.in rishadassi.cs18@rvce.edu.in

Abstract— E-waste, or electronic waste, encompasses

electrical and electronic equipment that’s outdated, unwanted,
or broken. When electronics are mishandled during disposal,
these chemicals end up in soil, water, and air. A majority of the
E-waste producers in India are either unable to or unaware
about how to dispose of the generated waste and this creates a
threat of them being disposed of in an incorrect manner which
has severe environmental consequences. The detection of E-
waste is the fundamental step for safely disposing and recycling
this waste to minimize its impact on the environment. This study
proposes a system that uses YOLOv5, to identify and classify E-
waste and a portal to connect the waste producers and collectors,
making the collection process more accessible. The ultimate goal
is to apply technology for effectively disposing waste and
minimizing the harmful impacts of incorrect or no disposal.
Fig. 1. Consumer E-waste selling strategy [Source: Dwivedy and Mittal
Keywords— Object Detection, YOLOv5, E-waste, Waste (2012)[4]]]
disposal, Convolutional Neural Network
B. Relevance of the research for present/future scenarios
I. INTRODUCTION
The prevalence of technology in the Indian society due
A. Motivation For Research to accessibility to devices has led to an inevitable increase
The rapid economic and technological development and in the quantity of waste that is generated. The waste
the continuous rise in people’s living standards have generators in the purview of this paper refers to household
significantly accelerated the waste generation rate of electrical and localized generators of waste that provide their E-
and electronic equipment (EEE) in the world [1]. The usage waste to the informal sector. The collectors are the local
time of EEE is shortening due to the availability of cheaper companies or shops that deal in E-waste collection and
products with new and improved features. As a result, a lot of either sell it to recycling centres or recycle the waste
old electronic gadgets have gone out of use and need themselves. The lack of awareness on proper disposal
recycling. Electronic waste (E-waste) includes a wide variety amongst waste generators leads to improper disposal,
and range of devices such as bulb, battery, mobile phones, amplifying the harm due to the increasing rate of
remote, audio-video player, computer, laptop, tablet, generation of E-waste. Figure 2 demonstrates that the
television, washing machine, refrigerator, air conditioner, etc. quantity of electronic waste is not likely to reduce anytime
which has been rejected by the end-user. Numerous studies soon.
have been conducted that showcase that E-waste comprises
hazardous chemicals like mercury, lead, beryllium, On-Demand waste collection, where the resident requests
chromium, arsenic, polyvinyl chloride, etc. which require the collection from a household is one of the methods for the
special handling during the disposal and recycling process [2]. waste collection process highly suitable for cities [5]. This
study aims to enhance this method by creating a bridge
The E-waste management situation in India is alarming between the waste generators and producers in the form of an
with about 10 lakh tonnes of E-waste generated in the year object detection system that helps classify the E-waste
2019, with growth rates of 32% (in 2020) and only 10% being
effectively collected [3]. Most of the E-waste ends up being
processed by the informal sector as seen in Figure 1. This is
mainly because the majority of the E-waste producers in India
are unaware about how to dispose of the generated waste
while the collectors don’t know which areas to collect the
waste from. There isn’t any dedicated system to ease the entire
process of waste management in an organized manner.

978-1-6654-0610-9/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE

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Fig. 2. Year wise E-waste generation in India [Source: Centre for Science
and Environment, 2020 compiled from the Global E-waste Statistics
Partnership]
and enables the collectors to make appropriate
arrangements for the collection and processing of the same.
C. Proposed System
The proposed system aims to connect waste producers and
waste collectors via a portal that deploys an object detection
model (YOLOv5). The end-user (here, waste producer) is
required to click an image of the E-waste of one or more types
and upload on the portal. This image will be fed to the Object
Detection model, which will classify the image based on the
basic classes defined (bulb, battery, mobile phone, monitor,
keyboard, laptop, mouse and phone). The deep learning
algorithm YOLO-You Only Look Once which is a real-time
object detection system, is used in this process. Once the
detection is completed, the relevant data such as the type and
quantity of E-waste mapped with the region is stored and can
be retrieved by the waste collector. An important factor used
in this work while connecting the generators to the collectors
is their geographical location which has been narrowed down
to the area under the same pin-code which is approximately a
5km radius. The waste collectors can accordingly plan the
collection to optimally use resources and minimize
transportation costs. Overall, the model aids in simplifying the
process of identifying E-waste and assisting the waste
collectors and generators in disposing the waste in the right
manner.
D. Organization of the Paper
The introduction of the paper is followed by a brief
description of the related works. Post the literature survey, the
proposed work with the overview of the system, dataset
information and model architecture have been covered. After
the proposed work, the results of the project, that is, details
about YOLOv5 model training and the detection results based
on the evaluation metrics have been discussed.
II. RELATED WORKS
A. Online E-waste Market
With increase in the generation of household E-waste and
no organized market, majority of it ends up in landfills or
incinerated along with municipal waste. Developed countries
have well-structured systems to control their E-waste with
some fees for recycling. But this method is likely to fail in
India as it imposes cost to the end users. Indian end-users are
willing to sell their E-waste to door-to-door waste collectors
for a nominal price. The end-users’ major problems and
concerns regarding their E-waste can be solved significantly
by an online E-waste market. This approach was observed to
have benefits of being time saving, convenient collection
facility, proper disposal and recycling, easily accessible
market, earning of some money by the producers, reducing E-
waste at home, attractive exchange offers by dealers/retailers
and reuse by others. An online E-waste market was also
shown as an important predictor for economic, environmental,
social and health benefits [6].
Internet-based solutions for waste collection methods as a
result of recent studies demonstrates the potential of an online
waste collection service. Smartphones and web/mobile
applications are everywhere and can serve as a suitable means
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to enhance communication between producers and collection
companies. The concept is to use a digital image to facilitate
the exchange of information between a waste collection
company and residents that are requesting waste retrieval
services. This model offers advantages of organization,
logistics and data collection that can further help the collection
companies to plan the collection based on the type, size and
quantity of E-waste [7].
At present, the mobile applications which support waste
collection have a rather limited scope, mainly used for
locating waste collection points or to set reminders about
waste collection schedules [7].
B. Object Detection Models
An object detection model using CNN to classify the E-
waste and a faster Region Based Convolutional Neural
Network (R-CNN) to automate the identification of multiple
objects and size of the equipment, with modifications to the
CNN layer organization in three ways- number of filters, size
of filters and method of scanning inputs to achieve the best
network accuracy. The R-CNN network gave an accuracy of
90-96.7% and the two CNN network configurations gave
accuracy of 93.3% and 96.7% respectively. The study was
based on a small dataset for training and the model covered
only three types of equipment- refrigerators, washing
machines, and monitors or TV sets. The planning process
could be supported using intelligent algorithms to optimize
collection vehicle routes [7].
Municipal solid waste (MSW) have landfilling,
composting and incineration as the main ways of disposal.
Materials like glass, metals, electronic scraps, batteries etc,
aren’t fit for disposal in any of these categories and hence
preliminary sorting is essential to use MSW efficiently as a
resource. The design is an automated sorting unit that uses a
neural network that detects and classifies waste on a conveyor
belt and transports the waste to collection bins according to
type. The study uses a R-CNN model to identify multiple
objects of different types within an image. The mean Average
precision (mAP) score of 64.1% was obtained by the model.
The model performed training on a small dataset, which
couldn’t fully represent all possible features of the classes of
images under consideration [8].
The model performed training on a small dataset, which
couldn’t fully represent all possible features of the classes of
images under consideration [8]. The main focus is to automate
classification of recyclables from E-waste into broad
categories like PCB, metal, plastic, and glass using thermal
imaging-based techniques and augment sharpness as a feature
vector extracted from the detected thermograms to improvise
the classification accuracy rate. This approach gave a success
rate of 84-96% for the simulated E-waste. The method can be
enhanced to classify more diverse E-waste by augmenting
hyperspectral imaging (HSI) sensors to thermal imaging
techniques [9].
The paper proposes a refined feature-fusion structure
Single Shot Detector (RFSSD) network in order to raise the
detection accuracy of Single Shot Detector (SSD). RFSSD
achieves 79.23% mAP which is 2.03% higher than that of the
original SSD. The proposed RFSSD has better speed and
accuracy than both Faster R-CNN and DSSD321. Even
though RFSSD is slightly slower due to its larger size, its
detection performance is surpassing YOLOv2 and SSD300.
The feature-refined structure has scope to be applied to other
neural networks for better performance, such as the Faster R-
CNN and YOLO series [10].
An attempt towards waste segregation using the YOLOv3
algorithm and highlighting the drawbacks of its predecessors
and a comparative analysis between YOLOv3 and YOLOv3-
tiny algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that the
detection capability and prediction probability of YOLOv3
(mAP%- 94.99) is significantly higher than YOLOv3-tiny
(mAP%- 51.95). The study does not consider the garbage
consisting of many complexities, such as objects made up of
more than one type of material and may inherit other-class
objects [11].
The presence of an online E-waste market is the need of
the hour and the work may help better in disposing off the e-
wastes. After understanding the scope of different models for
object detection, the most recent development in the YOLO
series of algorithms, the YOLOv5 model, was opted, which
gives real-time object detection.
III. PROPOSED WORK
A. Overview
The system constitutes of three primary divisions, namely,
the Waste Generator, Waste Collector and the Object
Detection Model. The waste producer uploads an image of the
e-waste of one or more types from which electronic waste is
detected by the YOLOv5 model. The object is classified into
specific categories and thereafter the information is made
available for a waste collector. Figure 3 below shows an
overview of the proposed system.
Fig. 3. Proposed System
B. Dataset
The dataset for this project is created by combining some
existing sources of E-waste datasets on platforms such as
Kaggle [12] [13] and a customized dataset created by
downloading images of E-waste that is found in India. The
images range from individual images of the object classes to
more complex images with multiple objects in the same
frame to keep it as realistic as possible.
Once the images are collected, all of them are annotated
manually using LabelImg, which is a graphical image
annotation tool written in Python [14]. With the dataset
images and annotations ready, preprocessing and data
augmentation steps are added using Roboflow which
provides an interface to convert images into formatted
datasets that can be used by a wide variety of machine
learning models [15].
The dataset consists of over 2.4k images in total with a
Train: Valid: Test split of 2100:202:101 images respectively.
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C. Model Architecture
YOLOv5, "You Only Look Once" Version 5, is a single-
phase detector and regional-based object detection network
that redefines object detection as a retrieval problem leading
to high processing speed. It has three main components - the
backbone, the neck and the head (for detection).
The backbone contains CNN that collects and organizes
image elements in various formats while the centre and scale
prediction (CSP) Bottleneck creates image elements [16].
YOLOv5 incorporates cross-stage partial net-work (CSPNet)
into Darknet, creating CSPDarknet as its backbone. CSPNet
solves the problems of duplicate gradient information in large
backbones, and incorporates gradient changes to the feature
map, thereby reducing the parameters and FLOPS (floating
point operation per second) of the model, which not only
ensures end speed and accuracy, but also reduces model size
[17]. In e-waste detection, this can be of great utility as the
major requirement is of speed and accuracy and a compact
model size to have faster inference and lesser training time.
For its neck, YOLOv5 uses the path aggregation network
(PANet), to increase the flow of information. PANet adopts a
new network, feature pyramid network (FPN) and an
improved bottom-up path, which improves the transmission of
low-level features. Concurrently, adaptive feature integration,
which links the feature grid to all feature levels, is used to
generate useful information at each feature level and distribute
it directly to the next subnetwork. PANet enhances the use of
precise localization features in the lower layers, which can
significantly increase the spatial accuracy of the object [17].
Hence, by employing the PANet neck structure, the detector
is enabled to produce better localization of the e-waste objects
within the image.
The YOLOv5 head, i.e. the YOLO layer, produces 3
different sizes (18 × 18, 36 × 36, 72 × 72) feature maps to
achieve multi-scale predictions, allowing the model to handle
smaller, medium and large objects. Therefore, the model can
detect objects in images taken closer to the e-waste source or
far from it since it supports detection for multiple sizes.
Discovery or detection is a process that uses features from the
head and takes box and class prediction steps [16]. A diagram
of the YOLOv5 architecture is shown in Figure 4.
YOLOv5 has different models based on size and
capability. A smaller model lets you train faster but with a
reduced mAP value. Figure 5 illustrates the comparisons of
these models. In this study, the small model is employed, in
order to obtain the fastest possible results.
 B. E-waste detection results
Fig. 4. Architecture of YOLOv5 [17]

Fig. 5. Comparison of different YOLOv5 models [18]

IV. RESULTS
A. Model Training
With the main aim to achieve the most accurate results by
training the YOLOv5s model (Pytorch implementation from
ultralytics) [18] on the e-waste dataset constructed, the model
was trained using the 195 e-waste images for each class (i.e.,
monitor, keyboard, mouse, bulb, battery, laptop and mobile
phone). The dataset was split into Train: Valid: Test split since
it can minimize the possibility of overfitting and enable the
model to be trained in a better way. Figure 6 and Figure 7 show
the ground truth for training data before and after
augmentation.
To evaluate object detection models like R-CNN and
YOLO, the mean average precision (mAP) is used. The mAP
compares the ground-truth bounding box to the detected box
and returns a score. The higher the score, the more accurate
the model is in its detections. The mAP of a model is derived
from the metrics of precision-recall, average precision and
intersection over union (IoU). Average precision can be
obtained using Equation 1.

=∑ − +1 ∗
(1)

= 0, =1
= !"# % &ℎ ℎ (

Fig. 6. Ground truth for training data

Fig. 8. Uploaded Image

Fig. 7. Ground truth for augmented training data

The model was validated with a validation set of 202

images that comprised of images of different classes and with
instances of possible noise in images in terms of brightness or
cropped images etc. The model's robustness was tested with
intact e-waste appliance images and also with damaged e-
waste images. The model was able to detect the e-waste in
both these scenarios. The model was tested extensively and
evaluated before obtaining the deployable version in order to Fig. 9. Detected Image
prevent over-fitting on the training data and be able to function
efficiently in real time. In order to calculate mAP, a series of precision recall
curves are drawn with the IoU threshold set at varying levels

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of difficulty, for each class. The metric calculates the average
precision (AP) for each class individually across all of the IoU
thresholds. Then the metric averages the mAP for all classes
to arrive at the final estimate. Figure 8 and 9 show the visual
representations of metrics precision/recall curves and mAP for
the trained model respectively.
Fig. 10. Metrics: Precision/Recall graphs
E-waste recycling and disposal and minimizes the harms
caused by incorrect processing of the waste.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Prabindh Sundareson for
contributing towards the project’s initial concept and
methodology.

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