Recent Comment
Share
Recycling and reusing electronic components could be made much easier with a new polymer that produces a circuit board that will dissolve when immersed in hot water. The circuit board was developed by the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) as part of the ReUSE (Reuseable, Unzippable, Sustainable Electronics) project.
The circuit board material is hardy enough to withstand ordinary heat and moisture, but full immersion in hot water acts to release the components from the board. This allows for over 90% of the electronics materials to be recovered, whereas typically less than 2% of the materials on a circuit board are re-used.
Although this is not necessarily beneficial for the repairability of electronics, it could be a definite improvement in helping get a handle on the growing mountains of electronics waste and make recycling of electronics components and recovery of minerals an easier process.
Video link: YouTube
image: CC BY-SA 1.0 by Mark Pellegrini/Wikimedia
via: Treehugger
Subscribe to this comment's feed
written by prasan, November 07, 2012
But instead of hot water there should be any other dis-solvent that will work for RF PCBs also, because today the RF PCBs are world dominating today & they need more attention.
-
- +0
-
-
written by fencerdave, November 11, 2012
The articles on this site are organized for the purpose of informing the readership of a broad spectra of environmental developments. It is not a scientific journal, nor should it be treated as one.
When in doubt, don't forget to be awesome.
-
- +1
-
-
written by BozemanMan, November 20, 2012
Today, few of the items obtainable from any individual printed circuit board have any great value. However, many kilos of PCBs have recycle value. Machinery and processes evolved over the years to efficiently extract the values from bulk PCBs. Just about any PCB can just be thrown into the mix and processed.
New machinery and techniques should be investigated such as water soluable PCBs in order to attain a better way to recycle.
-
- +1
-
-
written by Computer Recycling Thetford, January 03, 2013
-
- +0
-
-
written by cell phone spy, March 12, 2013
-
- +0
-
-
| Next > |
|---|
I doubt that this material would be any good at all for RF (radio frequency) PCBs since it absorbs water. It would have helped if EcoGeek published the dielectric data for this material and how it compares with the industry standard FR4 material.
Assuming it is no good for RF applications, this would mean that it would not be suitable mobile phones, high speed digital boards and television circuits.