Dive summary:

• The top three entries in a competition to find a new way to track e-waste have received a shared $10,000 prize and their ideas will be used to create new ways to track electronics in environmentally-friendly ways.
• The winners included a 12-digit code printed onto subsystem components, an electronic tag that works with an online crowd-sourcing platform and sheet of labels with encrypted codes.
• The contest was made possible through the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and data storage company EMC Corporation which plans to share the winning ideas with its peers in the industry.

From the article:

Three suggestions have won a $10,000 InnoCentive challenge to design a cutting-edge solution for tracking electronic waste in an environmentally sustainable way.

Of the more than 60 submissions, the following three will share the cash prize for helping develop a process or device that would allow electronics manufacturers to follow what happens to their products (e-waste) as they make their way through the waste stream. ...