Electronic waste, or e-waste, is a rapidly growing global problem, and it鈥檚 expected to worsen with the production of new kinds of flexible electronics for robotics, wearable devices, health monitors, and other new applications, including single-use devices. A new kind of flexible substrate material developed at MIT, the University of Utah, and Meta has the potential to enable not only the recycling of materials and components at the end of a device鈥檚 useful life, but also the scalable manufacture of more complex multilayered circuits than existing substrates provide.
The development of this new material is described this week in the journal RSC: Applied Polymers, in a paper by MIT Professor Thomas J. Wallin, University of Utah Professor Chen Wang, and seven others. 鈥淲e recognize that electronic waste is an ongoing global crisis that鈥檚 only going to get worse as we continue to build more devices for the internet of things, and as the rest of the world develops,鈥� says Wallin, an assistant professor in MIT鈥檚 Department of Materials Science and Engineering. To date, much academic research on this front has aimed at developing alternatives to conventional substrates for flexible electronics, which primarily use a polymer called Kapton, a trade name for polyimide.
Most such research has focused on entirely different polymer materials, but 鈥渢hat really ignores the commercial side of it, as to why people chose the materials they did to begin with,鈥� Wallin says. Kapton has many advantages, including excellent thermal and insulating properties and ready availability of source materials.