MIT Solve

Solution Overview

Solution Name

WALL-E

One-line solution summary.

Facilitate door to door collection of E-waste and give reward coupons in return. We will also create a one-stop destination to connect people to repair or recycle electronics.

Elevator pitch

What is your solution?

We will ask our customers to give us all sorts of e-waste and in return, they can get a respectable amount of credit that would be applicable to trusted websites and portals.

WALL-E will have two major verticals –

E-Waste

Will be profitable

E-waste will be outsourced to other companies and after having some stability we will set up our own plants.

Customers to get vouchers in return worth even more than the valuation of the product.

Repairing

Will not be profitable

Done by a team of hired technicians and freelancers

Customers can get their devices repaired for a small amount

This vertical is only there to connect people to us for knowing us because according to the research work carried and the past track record it will not at all be profitable.

We will also be partnering with small scale offices to get their devices repaired and recycled.

What specific problem are you trying to solve?

The whole of Earth is suffering from the problem of E-waste currently and we will create a dent in this problem.
The problem is knowingly and unknowingly faced by all age groups.

82% of E-waste generated is personal E-waste.

53.6 AND 3.23 MILLION METRIC TONS E-Waste is produced globally and in India.

The E-waste that is generated globally is worth 62.5 Billion Dollars, which is even greater than the GDP of many countries.

Paradigm shift going to take place because of chip shortage.

(Industry news site Semiconductor Engineering highlighted the risk of a chip shortage, partly due to a lack of 200mm manufacturing equipment.)

India generated 708,445 tonne e-waste in 2017-18 and 771,215 tonne the following fiscal, the report estimated. In 2019-20, the figure rose 32 per cent to 1,014,961 tonne, said a report by the Central Pollution Control Board.

Who does your solution serve? In what ways will the solution impact their lives?

Currently, we all are having our previous devices stacked up in our houses and they are of no use to us but that does not mean that they are useless, we can recycle them and extract the parts that are useful to help us re-derive monetary value from them.

More than the monetary impact we will be creating a social impact by up-skilling and educating people that will do the groundwork of the collection and repair of electronic devices.

We will be impacting the lives of about 1100 employees and associates within three years.

Our customers will also experience a new market and that number would be around 2 lakhs in the next 3 years.

If we can expand to about 4 cities then we will be changing the lives of about 350 out of which 200 would be experiencing a notch-up in their lifestyle because we will also be partnering with third-party companies to train our employees, get customized tools etc.

What steps have you taken to understand the needs of the population you want to serve?

As soon as we were hit with the thought of doing something regarding the E-waste shortage, we did our preliminary research to understand the depth of the problem, its root cause, its consequences and the ways by which it is already being tackled.

We then reached out to our college professors who were specialised in Electronics as well as people who were heavily involved in environment protection activities to discuss the problem and how we were planning to go about to solve them so as to get a broader understanding of our Idea's feasibility and effect in the long term.

We even reached to our families, friends and general public to broadly know how much electronic waste is present per household in our local area and also how many of these people are willing to get a repair or give their electronic waste to us. Doing this has also helped us devising marketing strategies for our product so as to gain the participation of maximum people.

Being satisfied with our idea, we got back to research exploring the various technologies we can use to implement our idea, particularly the plant that we've thought of, which will encompass E-waste segregation facilities, workshops for our technical staff for repairing of electronic items with adequate inventory of tools and materials to carry out the same.

Which aspects of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?

Improving financial and economic opportunities for all (Economic Prosperity)

Our solution's stage of development:

Concept: An idea being explored for its feasibility to build a product, service, or business model based on that idea

Explain why you selected this stage of development for your solution—in other words, what have you accomplished to date?

We have selected the stage - Concept because most of the work done by us is done at a very grassroots level because it is a very capital intensive idea but will solve a major problem faced by the current world and we think we have figured out the way how to be profitable. We just need proper mentorship so that we are able to manage such a huge amount of cash flow and gain connections. We have done both ground and fundamental research that was within our reach. In-ground research we visited service centres of leading electronic brands and they led us to an office that exported E-waste to recycling plants which were collected from these centres. We also called some of the plants to know about their operating cost and setup cost. Along with searching the internet, we also visited some local repair shops and their customers to understand their pain points.

Where our solution team is headquartered or located:

Manipal, Karnataka, India

Team Lead:

Arpit Baj