Et Cetera
Automated E-Waste Collection System

Designing the missing link in India's e-waste chain.

Et Cetera is an automated e-waste collection system. It is a physical kiosk designed to sit in the spaces where consumers already go: marketplaces, residential complexes, electronics retail zones. The goal is to make the act of disposing of e-waste as frictionless as depositing cash at an ATM.

The project started from a data point that is difficult to process. India is the third largest producer of e-waste in the world. Only 1% of it is formally recycled. The informal recycling sector, centred around places like Seelampur in Delhi, handles the majority of what does get processed, but under conditions that are hazardous for workers and environmentally destructive. The gap between the volume of waste produced and the infrastructure for handling it is not a technical problem. It is a design problem.

A system designed to fail the people inside it.

The current e-waste flow in India is not a system. It is a sequence of informal handoffs between actors who have no visibility into each other's processes. A consumer who wants to dispose of an old phone has no sanctioned, convenient way to do so. Their options are: leave it in a drawer indefinitely, sell it to a kabadiwala at a fraction of its material value, or find their way to an electronics marketplace like Nehru Place or Gaffar Market in Delhi.

The Seelampur neighbourhood in Shahdara, Delhi, is estimated to process the majority of India's e-waste. Workers there dismantle electronics by hand using methods that expose them to lead, mercury, cadmium, and brominated flame retardants. The work is illegal in its current form. It exists because the formal recycling infrastructure does not reach the consumer and the consumer does not reach the formal infrastructure.

Four research areas. One consistent gap.

Research was conducted across four distinct actor groups in the e-waste ecosystem. The goal was to understand where the system broke down at each handoff and where a designed intervention could create the most leverage.

The kiosk as the missing infrastructure layer.

The Et Cetera kiosk is positioned as a collection point, not a recycling device. It does not process waste. It collects, identifies, sorts, and routes e-waste to the appropriate formal recycler or refurbisher. The design intervention is upstream of the Seelampur problem, not within it.

The kiosk accepts small electronics: phones, tablets, chargers, batteries, circuit boards. It uses a combination of weight sensors and computer vision to categorise the deposited item and assign it to the appropriate collection stream. The user receives a confirmation and, depending on the item's residual value, a credit toward future electronics purchases.

Industrial design as an interaction design problem.

The kiosk form was designed for placement in three primary contexts: electronics retail corridors like Nehru Place, residential complex lobbies, and municipal buildings. Each context has a different footfall density and a different user relationship with the object.

The visual identity uses a high-visibility lime green, the same green used on waste management infrastructure globally, to signal purpose without requiring literacy. The kiosk is readable at 20 metres. The interaction surface is at standing height with a single large deposit aperture. The feedback screen shows categorisation in real time.

Design can create infrastructure where policy has not.

Et Cetera was a college project, not a deployed product. But the research and system design process revealed something that extends beyond the specific object: the e-waste problem in India is solvable at the collection layer without waiting for policy intervention or formal recycler expansion. A well-designed collection touchpoint, placed in the right context, with the right incentive model, could redirect a meaningful volume of waste from the informal sector to certified handlers.

The project also demonstrated that industrial design and interaction design are not separate disciplines when the deliverable is a physical interactive object. The form of the kiosk is inseparable from the interaction model. The color is part of the wayfinding system. The material is part of the trust signal. These decisions were made together, not in sequence.

See the complete documentation on Behance.

This portfolio page covers the research context, system design, and design decisions for Et Cetera. The full visual documentation including 3D renders, physical prototype photography, system diagrams, research data visualisations, and the complete interaction flow is published on Behance.