Electronic waste, also known as e-waste, is a growing problem around the world.
Every year, millions of tonnes of obsolete or broken equipment including computers, mobile phones and other electronic gadgets are discarded.
According to researchers at Glasgow University, more than 53 million tonnes of electronic waste was dumped by consumers in 2019.
It is estimated that less than a fifth of such e-waste is recycled properly and much of it contains hazardous materials in components such as circuit boards and batteries.
Now, researchers at the university’s James Watt School of Engineering are working on a way to mitigate the impact of e-waste by making key components biodegradable.
The project is known as GEOPIC (Green Energy-Optimised Printed Transient Integrated Circuits) and builds on work already done at Glasgow University’s Bendable Electronics and Sensing Technologies (BEST) group.
The team has been awarded a grant of £1.5m from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to fund the project, which hopes to develop the green electronics over the next three years.
Project will use silicon nanomembranes to make biodegradable components
Researchers at BEST have developed a number of new electronic systems, including flexible printed circuits that can be stretched or bent while offering performance comparable to that of traditional electronic circuits.
They have also developed printable circuitry and energy-efficient devices that can be powered by human sweat.
They will build on previous work to design flexible integrated circuits using silicon nanomembranes that can be printed onto new kinds of biodegradable materials.
This means that the biodegradable materials can be left to harmlessly degrade when the circuits are disposed of, while the silicon components can be recycled.
Professor Ravinder Dahiya, the project’s principal investigator, said that there was an urgent need to deal with the growing problem of e-waste but without compromising the transformative power of electronic technology.
One way of doing this is to create new types of electronic systems where sustainable disposal is built into the design from first principles.
He added that current design and manufacturing processes resulted in significant amounts of chemical waste and many components that could only be partially recycled at best.
The researchers are hoping to help stem this flood of e-waste by developing commercial applications for the electronics developed during this initial phase.
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