Fully Recyclable Printed Electronics Eschew Toxic Chemicals

Duke University engineers have produced the world’s first fully recyclable printed electronics that replace the use of chemicals with water in the fabrication process. The work could lead to the industry reducing its environmental footprint and human health risks.

“If you’re making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, one layer on either slice of bread is easy,” explained Aaron Franklin  , the Addy Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke, who led the study. “But if you put the jelly down first and then try to spread peanut butter on top of it, forget it, the jelly won’t stay put and will intermix with the peanut butter. Putting layers on top of each other is not as easy as putting them down on their own — but that’s what you have to do if you want to build electronic devices with printing.”

Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] foreign s that has become of growing awareness in the semiconductor field is the impact that this technology has on the environment where there is a heavy energy demand and Reliance on toxic chemicals that goes into the actual fabrication of the Technologies right now you package your your computer chips

00:00:29 in a way that makes it very difficult to actually re-extract those materials in a recyclable fashion and electronic waste is a major fraction of the current uh you know ecological environmental damage that we see growing right now [Music] we've been able to demonstrate printing functional transistors the heart of an integrated circuit on paper substrates

00:01:06 and then recycling every scrap of that material and reusing it to print those devices again we want to Envision a future that doesn't require the same energy dependence or toxic gas Reliance the existing technologies have it might just be one where instead of gounding up and going to a clean room you end up walking into a facility that simply prints Electronics in the same manner as

00:01:34 newspapers off of a roll and if we can reach a place like that for our future we just might address both our technology hunger for improvement and our responsibility for reducing the impact on the climate thank you [Music]