Developments and challenges in design for sustainability of electronics

Sustainability of electronic products until recently mainly focused on improving the energy efficiency. Recently, resource efficiency has become of growing importance. Due to the use of relatively small amounts of many valuable and scarce materials, often intimately mixed, the design of electronic products deserves specific attention. From a...

An innovative route to circular rigid plastics

An innovative route for plastics recycling is proposed, based on a combination of a logarithmic sorting process and colour plus high-resolution near-infrared (NIR) sensors. Although counterintuitive, it is shown that such a technology could sort clean flakes from rigid packaging waste into a very large number of different plastic grades with...

Reprintable paste-based materials for additive manufacturing in a circular economy

The circular economy requires high-value material recovery to enable multiple product lifecycles. This implies the need for additive manufacturing to focus on the development and use of low-impact materials that, after product use, can be reconstituted to their original properties in terms of printability and functionality. We therefore...