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LBL scientists demonstrate a
fully biodegradable PC board
BERKELEY, Calif. — According to the
United Nations, less than a quarter of
all U.S. electronic waste gets recycled.
In 2021 alone, global e-waste surged
at 57.4 million tons, and only 17.4%
of that was recycled.
E-waste problem
Some experts predict that our e-waste
problem will only get worse over time, Junpyo Kwon, a Ph.D. student researcher from the Xu Group at
because most electronics on the market UC Berkeley, is shown holding a recyclable, biodegradable printed
circuit.
today are designed for portability, not re-
cyclability. easy to say it’s impossible to solve and
walk away,” said senior author Ting Xu, a
faculty senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s
Tablets and readers, for example, are as-
sembled by gluing circuits, chips, and hard Materials Sciences Division, and profes-
drives to thin layers of plastic, which must sor of chemistry and materials science and
be melted to extract precious metals like engineering at UC Berkeley.
copper and gold.
More evidence
Burning plastic releases toxic gases into “But scientists are finding more evidence
the atmosphere, and electronics wasting of significant health and environmental
away in landfill often contain harmful ma- concerns caused by e-waste leaching into
terials like mercury, lead, and beryllium. the soil and groundwater.
Potential solution “With this study, we’re showing that even
But now, a team of researchers from the though you can’t solve the whole problem
Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley yet, you can at least tackle the problem of
National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC recovering heavy metals without polluting
Berkeley have developed a potential solu- the environment.”
tion: a fully recyclable and biodegradable
printed circuit. Putting enzymes to work
In a previous study, Xu and her team dem
onstrated a biodegradable plastic material
The researchers, who re- embedded with purified enzymes such as
ported the new device in the Burkholderia cepacian lipase (BC-lipase).
journal Advanced Materials,
say that the advance could Through that work, they discovered that
divert wearable devices and hot water activates BC-lipase, prompting
other flexible electronics the enzyme to degrade polymer chains
from landfill, and mitigate
Ting Xu into monomer building blocks. They also
the health and environmen- learned that BC-lipase is a finicky “eater.”
al hazards posed by heavy metal waste. Before a lipase can convert a polymer
chain into monomers, it must first catch
“When it comes to plastic e-waste, it’s next page
