Sustainable Electronics: Compostable Circuit Boards Made from Citric Acid Production Waste - Renewable Carbon News
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© TUBAF Worldwide, discarded electronic toys, computers, or smartphones are becoming increasingly massive amounts of electronic waste. The basis for electronic circuits are printed circuit boards (PCB), which are typically made of glass fiber-reinforced fossil epoxy resin, making them difficult to recycle, let alone biodegrade. A team from TU Bergakademie…

Instead of disposing of this biomass waste, the team processes it into a plastic-like material through an innovative process involving molding and air-drying, resulting in a small, approximately 0.5 cm thick plate with a density of 1.23 g/cm³, comparable to the density of conventional printed circuit boards (PCBs). Using direct ink writing or a standard etching process and manual soldering, the researchers were able to deposit electronic components directly onto the fungal plates.

  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    1·
    3 days ago

    I don’t know all the details, but the impression I get is that much of the popularity of disposable vapes has been driven by regulatory efforts to crack down on other aspects of vaping, even when the disposable vapes themselves are made illegal by them:

    But Nancy Heredia-Villanueva, the mom who stormed the gas station, says local authorities in her area haven’t shown interest in enforcing sales of illegal vapes – even though they’re specifically banned in New Jersey law.

    First, she reported the store to police: “I had to actually email ordinances to the detective,” she says. "And even then, he was like: ‘Well, what am I supposed to do about it?’

    In general it seems like a complex issue with a variety of things behind it (at least one comment here implies that bans on taking vapes on planes also drives the use of disposables for instance), so if the goal is to address the e-waste part of the problem I could see how you might want a multi-pronged approach. But yeah compostable circuit boards isn’t really a total solution, those things also have lithium batteries etc.