New PCB design is repeatably recyclable — vitrimer PCBs could save millions of tons in eWaste, say UW researchers
vPCBs can be recycled with 98% vitrimer recovery and 100% glass fiber recovery.
Thanks, looks interesting. I wonder how often this material can be recycled. In the paper they only compare pristine and once-recycled and in the abstract claim that there's no degradation but there appears to be slight degradation of the recycled material outside the variance of pristine material.
I wonder how often this material can be recycled.
Fractures and holes in vPCBs can be repaired while retaining comparable performance over more than four repair cycles.
Edit: wait, holes and repair cycles, i think i'm wrong here.
Literally no mention in the article of how durable these things are. Kind of matters for how well they could just outright replace regular PCBs. I imagine it's perfectly fine for stuff you'd have at home or an office, but there's electronics everywhere these days. Would they last just as long in a car? Airplane? Tractors? Boats? Submarines? Satellites? Shuttles?
They don't need to replace PCBs everywhere, even doing so just in the stuff that already doesn't last long would make a huge difference. In long term applications you get less waste per unit of time anyway.
In the article there was a link to UW:s own article which had a link to research groups own page, which had a link to original research: "Recyclable vitrimer-based printed circuit boards for sustainable electronics" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-024-01333-7 .
I'm just a curious layman, but on my cursory look it seems that it's quite stable against heat, moisture and chemicals. Looks promising, hopefully this is cheap enough that manufacturers actually start using it.
Ahh, I messed up my other comments. No matter, but I found the pre print here if you want to read more into it
Cool, then we can use it for home and office stuff, and not the rest, then. Reducing some e-waste is better than reducing none.
this is also a relevant question for home electronics, reduce and reuse comes before recycle for a reason.
A re-usable PCB is a hugely important development if it proves profitable. Some of the most heinously environmentally unfriendly "forever-chemicals" are more or less irreplaceable for use in electronics, in terms of function, price, and raw effectiveness (looking at you, flame-retardants), so reusability would create incentive to reduce waste and therefore our environment's exposure to pollutants. I could imagine an electronics return-for-cash system, like the extremely effective "pant" system in Scandinavian countries. I believe that the availability and ease of return for empty bottles (automated return stations at virtually every grocery store) is what contributes the lion's share of the pant system's effectiveness, so if there were a similar system implemented for electronics, with electronics stores being required to take in any old electronics using these reusable PCBs, I could see it being extremely effective in reducing e-waste.
However, if these new PCB's aren't profitable to implement, I'm sure we'll never see them used in the first place, unfortunately. But it's definitely something I would use for my own home electronics projects, no question.
The article also mentions a water-soluble PCB at the end. It sounds like an interesting solution to simplify the material/component recovery process (and most likely reduce the cost of material recovery dramatically), but I also wonder how easily and quickly water-soluble PCBs would degrade from humidity.
