Blockchain-Based Forward and Reverse Supply Chains for E-waste Management

In this paper, we propose a novel smart e-waste management system, by leveraging the power of blockchain technology and smart contract, that considers both forward and reverse supply chains. This allows the proposed system to capture whole life cycle of e-products, starting from their manufacturing (as new products) to their disposal (as e-wastes) and their recycling back to raw materials. In this context, we address various challenges and limitations which existing blockchain-based solutions are facing, especially incomplete coverage of e-products' life cycle, access control, payment mechanism, incentivization, scalability issue, missing experimental validation, etc. We present a prototype implementation of the system as a proof-of-concept using Solidity on Ethereum platform, and we perform an experimental evaluation to demonstrate its feasibility and performance in terms of execution gas cost.