Electronic waste is growing faster than we can recycle it.
Old phones, laptops, and other gadgets often end up in landfills, leaking harmful chemicals like lead and mercury into the environment.
By 2030, experts predict the world could produce around 60 million tons of e-waste each year — a massive threat to both people and the planet.
A team of researchers at the University of Washington has developed a new kind of material that could make future electronics much easier to reuse and recycle.
Their invention is flexible, self-healing, and conductive — meaning it can carry electricity like traditional circuit boards but without all the waste.
The research, led by assistant professor Mohammad Malakooti, was recently published in Advanced Functional Materials.
Traditional circuit boards are made from rigid fiberglass and resin with metal lines that carry electrical signals. Once damaged or outdated, these boards are hard to recycle. The new material, by contrast, is soft and stretchable. It’s made of a recyclable polymer filled with tiny droplets of a liquid metal alloy based on gallium — a silvery metal that stays liquid at low temperatures.
To create a circuit, the researchers simply score or scratch a pattern on the surface of the composite. This connects the metal droplets just enough to let electricity flow through the pattern, while the rest of the material stays non-conductive.
What makes this discovery remarkable is that the material can be cut into pieces, rearranged, and bonded back together using only heat and pressure. After being reattached, the circuit still works — even in its new shape. “We created a lot of functionality within one material,” Malakooti said. “Our goal is to build a widely useful platform for flexible, reusable devices.”
The material can also be chemically broken down to separate the polymer from the metal, allowing the metal to be recovered and reused. In experiments, the researchers were able to reclaim 94% of the liquid metal from their samples, showing the material’s potential for real recycling.
Malakooti’s lab has been studying liquid metal–based materials since 2019, even using machine learning to test different formulas. But as liquid metals become more expensive, the team focused on making them reusable — a step toward sustainable electronics.
Malakooti believes this new material could lead to a new way of making technology — one focused on designing devices to be repaired, reshaped, and recycled instead of thrown away. “We can’t make all these devices and then go back and try to figure out how to recycle them,” he said. “I want to tackle this problem from the very start.”
Source: KSR.
