Every year, the pile of discarded electronics—known as e-waste—keeps growing. From broken phones and outdated laptops to worn-out appliances, our digital lives are producing a massive amount of trash.
A 2024 United Nations report shows that global e-waste has nearly doubled in just 12 years, reaching 62 billion kilograms—enough to fill over 1.5 million shipping trucks.
Even worse, only about 20% of that is actually recycled, a percentage that isn’t expected to improve much.
But a new discovery from Virginia Tech could offer a powerful new tool in the fight against this waste.
Two research teams—one from mechanical engineering and one from chemistry—have created a new type of circuit board that’s not only recyclable but also self-healing and durable.
Michael Bartlett, a mechanical engineering professor, and Josh Worch, a chemistry professor, teamed up to develop this material with help from their research students, including Dong Hae Ho, Meng Jiang, and Ravi Tutika.
What they came up with is a smart blend of cutting-edge chemistry and clever engineering. The result? A material that can conduct electricity, fix itself after damage, and still hold strong like traditional plastics used in circuit boards.
The base of this material is something called a vitrimer. It’s a type of plastic that can be reshaped and recycled by applying heat.
To make it conduct electricity, the researchers added tiny droplets of liquid metal, which carry electric current just like the solid metal parts in regular electronics.
What makes this breakthrough special is how well these features work together. Many flexible or recyclable materials aren’t strong enough for real-world use, or they break down too easily. But this new circuit board can stretch, bend, and even suffer some damage—and still keep working.
“Our material is very different from the usual electronic components,” said Bartlett. “Even when it’s bent or damaged, it keeps functioning like nothing happened.”
Normally, recycling circuit boards is a messy, energy-hungry process that loses valuable materials like gold, copper, and other metals.
But this new material can be healed with heat and eventually taken apart using a chemical solution, allowing researchers to recover important components like LEDs and liquid metal.
Although this invention is still in the research stage, it represents a major step forward. These smart, self-healing circuit boards could someday lead to more sustainable electronics and help reduce the mountain of e-waste heading to landfills every year.
Even if we can’t stop people from tossing out old tech, we might soon be able to recycle it in a cleaner, smarter way.
Source: Virginia Tech.
