David L. Chandler of MIT reports that a new kind of flexible substrate material developed at MIT, the University of Utah, and Meta could help combat e-waste. Chandler writes:
Electronic waste, or e-waste, is a rapidly growing global problem, and it’s expected to worsen with the production of new kinds of flexible electronics for robotics, wearable devices, health monitors, and other new applications, including single-use devices.
A new kind of flexible substrate material developed at MIT, the University of Utah, and Meta has the potential to enable not only the recycling of materials and components at the end of a device’s useful life, but also the scalable manufacture of more complex multilayered circuits than existing substrates provide.
The development of this new material is described this week in the journal RSC: Applied Polymers, in a paper by MIT Professor Thomas J. Wallin, University of Utah Professor Chen Wang, and seven others.
“We recognize that electronic waste is an ongoing global crisis that’s only going to get worse as we continue to build more devices for the internet of things, and as the rest of the world develops,” says Wallin, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. To date, much academic research on this front has aimed at developing alternatives to conventional substrates for flexible electronics, which primarily use a polymer called Kapton, a trade name for polyimide. […]
“We break the polymer back into its original small molecules. Then we can collect the expensive electronic components and reuse them,” Wallin adds. “We all know about the supply chain shortage with chips and some materials. The rare earth minerals that are in those components are highly valuable. And so we think that there’s a huge economic incentive now, as well as an environmental one, to make these processes for the recapture of these components.”
The research team included Caleb Reese and Grant Musgrave at the University of Utah, and Jenn Wong, Wenyang Pan, John Uehlin, Mason Zadan and Omar Awartani at Meta’s Reality Labs in Redmond, Washington. The work was supported by a startup fund at the Price College of Engineering at the University of Utah.
Read more here.
