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How clever is this?

Today an idea from the "why didn't someone think of this earlier" department.

EWaste is a growing problem around the world and thanks to the lack of repairability and rapid replacement cycles associated with modern electronic devices such as phones, tablets, computers and the like, we're creating an ever-growing pile of bits that are difficult and often uneconomic to recycle.

Sure, you can grind this stuff up and then extract the various metals and plastics from which it was made but such processing is inefficient and can create environmental issues. It's for this reason that we've all seen images of poor folk desoldering circuit boards over open fires in third-world countries in order to make a subsistence living -- all the while destroying the environment around them.

One of the biggest problems is that PCBs (printed circuit boards) are pretty tough, usually made from fibreglass. This means it becomes quite difficult to remove any attached components and reclaim the metals such as copper and gold that are bonded to it in the form of conductive traces.

Well maybe that's about to change.

According to this Science Daily story, a new PCB substrate has been developed that could make recycling far easier and more cost-effective.

Imagine being able to simply dissolve-away the circuit board itself, leaving the components, the copper traces and even the glass fibre strands.

Recycling then becomes a whole lot easier.

Instead of simply grinding up old circuit boards and recovering the raw materials in a manner that is inefficient and environmentally harmful, this new substrate offers the potential to recover all the individual components without damage and to hugely simplify the reclaimation and re-use of the various metals, fastners etc.

Even better, the new substrate itself can be reclaimed and made into new PCBs while the solvent used in the recycling process itself is not lost either.

Another bonus feature is that PCBs made from this new material can not only be more easily repaired in some cases but they can also be formed into shapes with curves and other topography that is presently impractical using existing technologies.

According to researchers, recycling boards made with this new material instead of traditional fibreglass could reduce the effect on global warming by 48 percent and slash carcinogenic emissions by 81 percent.

This has to be a fantastic opportunity to reduce the environmental footprint of all those discarded electronic devices that threaten to cause so much harm.

The really big question would have to be -- why didn't someone think of this before?

Carpe Diem folks!

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