{"id":189723,"date":"2024-05-19T11:28:05","date_gmt":"2024-05-19T16:28:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/new-circuit-boards-can-be-repeatedly-recycled"},"modified":"2024-05-19T11:28:05","modified_gmt":"2024-05-19T16:28:05","slug":"new-circuit-boards-can-be-repeatedly-recycled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/new-circuit-boards-can-be-repeatedly-recycled","title":{"rendered":"New Circuit Boards can be Repeatedly Recycled"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/new-circuit-boards-can-be-repeatedly-recycled.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A recent United Nations report found that the world generated 137 billion pounds of electronic waste in 2022, an 82% increase from 2010. Yet less than a quarter of 2022\u2019s e-waste was recycled. While many things impede a sustainable afterlife for electronics, one is that we don\u2019t have systems at scale to recycle the printed circuit boards (PCBs) found in nearly all electronic devices.<\/p>\n<p>PCBs \u2014 which house and interconnect chips, transistors and other components \u2014 typically consist of layers of thin glass fiber sheets coated in hard plastic and laminated together with copper. That plastic can\u2019t easily be separated from the glass, so PCBs often pile up in landfills, where their chemicals can seep into the environment. Or they\u2019re burned to extract their electronics\u2019 valuable metals like gold and copper. This burning, often undertaken in developing nations, is wasteful and can be toxic \u2014 especially for those doing the work without proper protections.<\/p>\n<p>A team led by researchers at the University of Washington developed a new PCB that performs on par with traditional materials and can be recycled repeatedly with negligible material loss. Researchers used a solvent that transforms a type of vitrimer \u2014 a cutting-edge class of sustainable polymers \u2014 to a jelly-like substance without damaging it, allowing the solid components to be plucked out for reuse or recycling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A recent United Nations report found that the world generated 137 billion pounds of electronic waste in 2022, an 82% increase from 2010. Yet less than a quarter of 2022\u2019s e-waste was recycled. While many things impede a sustainable afterlife for electronics, one is that we don\u2019t have systems at scale to recycle the printed [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":707,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1523,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-computing","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189723\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}