Water-Soluble Circuit Boards Could Cut Carbon Footprints By 60 Percent (engadget.com) 108
German semiconductor maker Infineon Technologies AG announced that it's producing a printed circuit board (PCB) that dissolves in water. Engadget reports: Jiva's biodegradable PCB is made from natural fibers and a halogen-free polymer with a much lower carbon footprint than traditional boards made with fiberglass composites. A 2022 study by the University of Washington College of Engineering and Microsoft Research saw the team create an Earth-friendly mouse using a Soluboard PCB as its core. The researchers found that the Soluboard dissolved in hot water in under six minutes. However, it can take several hours to break down at room temperature.
In addition to dissolving the PCB fibers, the process makes it easier to retrieve the valuable metals attached to it. âoeAfter [it dissolves], we're left with the chips and circuit traces which we can filter out,â said UW assistant professor Vikram Iyer, who worked on the mouse project. The video [here] shows the Soluboard dissolving in a frying pan with boiling water. "Adopting a water-based recycling process could lead to higher yields in the recovery of valuable metals," said Jonathan Swanston, CEO and co-founder of Jiva Materials. Jiva says the board has a 60 percent smaller carbon footprint than traditional PCBs -- specifically, it can save 10.5 kg of carbon and 620 g of plastic per square meter of PCB.
In addition to dissolving the PCB fibers, the process makes it easier to retrieve the valuable metals attached to it. âoeAfter [it dissolves], we're left with the chips and circuit traces which we can filter out,â said UW assistant professor Vikram Iyer, who worked on the mouse project. The video [here] shows the Soluboard dissolving in a frying pan with boiling water. "Adopting a water-based recycling process could lead to higher yields in the recovery of valuable metals," said Jonathan Swanston, CEO and co-founder of Jiva Materials. Jiva says the board has a 60 percent smaller carbon footprint than traditional PCBs -- specifically, it can save 10.5 kg of carbon and 620 g of plastic per square meter of PCB.
The big question (Score:5, Insightful)
- OR -
Did they see increased revenue from now mandatory replacements due to the inability to repair the devices after they get wet, and not care about the environmental costs of needing to provide such large numbers of additional units as replacements?
I ask because it's not addressed in the article, and most of the web page seems to be the usual corporate green-washing fluff. Focused more on leadership, investors, and big promises than any actual data.
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Re:The big question (Score:4, Interesting)
Will they stop all the humidity around? I have enough of aluminum utilities which did not stand corrosion long-term, and had to be disposed.
Re: The big question (Score:3)
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Nonsense what? That aluminium does corrode? That vapor is present in the air most of the time, only that with the varying degree? That its long-term effects better not be counted-in carefully?
As I type that, I feel that my duvet is wet to the uncomfortable feeling. Season of rain is here, and while warm, a lot of above-mentioned vapor crawled into the bedding. Similar is happening in the closest coastal neighborhood more, than elsewhere. You say, this not gonna happen with the water-sensitive substance. Of
Re: The big question (Score:2)
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Good, I am giving a chance to Infinion and you with it.
However, immediately you are left to deal with the rest of the issues:
1. Is global PCB industry good to align to the new guideline, and be outputting recyclable boards?
2. Or is this technology essentially copyright protected / handled by sole manufacturer?
3. How wide distribution of these products gonna be to make fishing out and processing of theirs reasonable?
4. Since pool of electronic waste gonna be common - is it viable to be on patrol to select po
Re: The big question (Score:2)
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If you want to succeed, you need to learn to persist. There are always thousands of reasons why it will be difficult. Brake a leg. Get out of your comfort zone. Fail.
What is it, brake a leg?
If you want to be proper, you have to. If you want the plan to work, you have to come with the one, which could.
Or you can just make impressions of important happening.
Re: The big question (Score:2)
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Most likely, I'm older than you - and this is the reason, you can't understand.
Re: The big question (Score:2)
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So, it goes back: reconsider above-spoken 10 years after, in case I'm not available to help you understand. Now you just can't properly care.
Re: The big question (Score:2)
Re: The big question (Score:4, Insightful)
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toys, appliances, and other random crap
Oh good. Nobody cares if toys, appliances, and other random household items are reliable and can be shared across generations.
A "real" application that came to mind would be for, say, those stupid musical greeting cards. They are specifically meant to be thrown away after a day or two. Of course, I'd be happier if such things just didn't exist at all.
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Re:The big question (Score:5, Insightful)
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Unintended consequences happen all of the time. Everyone seemed to cheer about outlawing R-22 refrigerant because R-410a has a lower ozone impact, but R-410a acidifies under intense heat (the kind that can happen with routine airflow issues in HVAC, like a clogged filter icing up the evaporator coil). The nature of refrigerants is that we're using the dramatic phase shift from compressing and evaporating which causes what we call superheating and subcooling. Since the refrigerant is already prone to acid
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If 20+ non-experts, in under 2 minutes, isolate what they think is a problem, there is a very little chance that has not already been considered.
Re: The big question (Score:1)
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Did the eco-friendly study also take into account the environmental costs of the additional waterproofing for all of these devices?
Did you read the article? It takes hours in boiling water to degrade.
Re:The big question (Score:4, Informative)
It appears maybe you didn't read clearly enough.
It said it could dissolve in 6 minutes in boiling water, several hours in room temp.
So, you spill a drink on your electronic doo-dad...and over the next few hours it starts to slowly decompose and stop working...great.
How about high humidity? Maybe over a few days when you take it out of the package, it starts to malfunction.
Unless you plan to go overboard and make ALL housings for all electronics completely waterproof, this isn't really a great idea for the real world.
I'm guessing the extremes they'd have to do to waterproof everything would more than offset the "carbon savings" of these new dissolvable PCB's....
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My mistake. Thanks for the correction.
Re: The big question (Score:4, Informative)
Are you telling me their FAQ does not fill your soul with confidence?
Is Soluboard susceptible to moisture?
Jiva is in the process of ensuring that Soluboard is compatible with aqueous PCB fabrication processes. Jiva is also engineering Soluboard to be resistant to high humidity environments.
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You do realize that's not a hard environment to make, right? Your PC can get plenty hot by itself, and other power electronics can easily get that hot or hotter.
You walk in from the rain, your PC is slightly wet, and then you crank up a game. Well, you have a damn PC and it's getting hot.
And the material might
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Not simply getting wet, what about humidity (Score:2)
Did they see increased revenue from now mandatory replacements due to the inability to repair the devices after they get wet>/quote> It's not just getting wet as in a splash, immersion, etc. What about atmospheric humidity? A steamy bathroom after a shower? Do the latter contribute to a degradation of the PCB?
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Did the eco-friendly study also take into account the environmental costs of the additional waterproofing for all of these devices?
How often do you immerse your computer in water for several minutes, much less several hours?
Electronic devices now typically have good enough waterproofing to prevent water getting into your device at all in typical use scenarios, because they don't work now if the electronics gets wet.
How often do you get you laptop so wet that it must be dried out to resume working? Never? Then you are opining about a non-real problem.
Generally immersing a piece of electronics in water at all is a pretty extraordinary,
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And what about the water that's now full of whatever chemicals were in the PCB??
Someone mentioned toys... so, no more washing your kids' grubby toys??
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Several hours to *dissolve* the PCB.
But just how splash-proof are they from repeated clumsy knockings-over of beverages onto a laptop keyboard?
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Well, with the case of a soda like Pepsi, coke..etc...you may also have to worry about residual carbonic acid that remains and slowly eats away at things.
I lost a clock rad
Re: The big question (Score:1)
Re:The big question (Score:5, Informative)
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Exactly. Think about vapor being there all the time, will it not find it's way in? Doesn't it suffice just for tiny little corner of the thing to deteriorate, to render it dysfunctional and useless?
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Probably not. After all, the board does nothing except hold things in place - the wire traces themselves are held in place by the protective coating that's usually applied on top of them.
If the board swells up and starts low-key coming apart like particle board in the rain... so what?
It could definitely be a problem though if the board deteriorates enough that one of the components it's holding can sag enough to make electrical contact with something else. Or if it expands with enough force to break solde
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...we have plenty of water-soluble materials in our daily life already that generally don't have any real problems with humidity - paper, particle board, etc.
Yep, this is the reason I got my passport soaked on a rainy day lately. It did exactly have problem with humidity. Which is only to intensify, if that wasn't enough.
Now, say, you have a board in your car. You have your notebook in your backpack, and rain pours out of nowhere. You have your cellphone, which is now more sensitive to humidity, than model of decades ago. If we need thing, it is more likely, than not, we want it more, not less reliable.
If thing stands test of time nicely - great, and yet: is thi
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If it deteriorates with any water, simple condensation from humidity will cause this green PCB to deteriorate over time.
Not to mention the PCB material trapping small quantities of atmospheric contaminants, some of which will be conductive. The devices may start to work erratically because of unintended conduction paths. Also, these boards sure as hell better not be used in devices that require voltages above 20 volts or so and at most a couple hundred milliamps - and even those figures may be pushing it a bit.
If they can make an FR4 substitute that dissolves in water, maybe they could make one that dissolves in isopropanol,
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If it deteriorates with any water, simple condensation from humidity will cause this green PCB to deteriorate over time.
Not surprising to see this bloviation get modded up to "insightful" these days on /.
This is an enormous leap of ignorant assumption. There is no reason to suppose that something that takes several hours of complete immersion to dissolve would deteriorate from ordinary humidity exposure - there being an enormous differences between the effects of immersion and mere humidity. And no, normally, water does not normally condense in competently packaged electronics now, because the device would quit working until
Why stop at PCBs? (Score:5, Funny)
60 percent reduction in carbon footprint is no joke!
Seeing as that's the most important metric of any product or process, i hope they bring their innovative material to other industries too: roofing, paving, maybe even plumbing. I can't wait!
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We've had the technology in the underwear industry for many years.
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Yes, edible underwear. Why not make the PCBs edible? Solve climate change and world hunger with one stroke!
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There are other relevant metrics too. For example, this would be a definite improvement over the old plumbing in my building with respect to the quantity of asbestos it contains...
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60 percent is only when first installed. Eventually, 100%.
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I've been counting the number of things she says that are correct, and after she said that, the count shot up to 1.
This is a misplaced April Fool, isn't it? (Score:1)
Wow, I've dropped my phone in a puddle, so I have "several hours" to transfer all my data to a new phone. If I have the money to hand, and am near a shop.
Seriously, this looks like aggressive planned obsolescence, not anything green.
Re:This is a misplaced April Fool, isn't it? (Score:4, Funny)
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Maybe you missed it but phones have been dunk-proof for several years.
Do they keep humidity out? I'm not sure but it could probably be added.
have "often" recovered from short dips (Score:2)
I've recovered my cell phone from a short dunk in the ocean (in a pocket, was accidentally dunked, took it home, redunked in filtered water + alcohol + thoroughly dried.
As well -- how many times have I recovered a mouse or keyboard from a spill followed by a cleaning....
Sounds like that would be considerably less likely. *ouch*
The trade-off may be worth it, but still...*arg*.
What about erosion due to water vapor (humidity) in air? If it slightly condenses due to
temperature changes? Hmmmm
Not sure the gain for this... (Score:2)
Yes, the PCB is able to be dissolved out... perhaps a PVA type of material, similar to FDM dissolvable filaments. However, with a lot of PCBs, you want them to be reliable and last as long as possible, because replacing them is just too difficult a task.
I just don't see a place for this PCB, because even if the PCB is gone, there are still solder traces, components, and a lot of other stuff which is e-waste. Especially keyboards or mice, because $DEITY knows what hell those things go through on a day to d
Re:Not sure the gain for this... (Score:4, Insightful)
> I just don't see a place for this PCB
Maybe you're not thinking hard enough. First up, if it takes less carbon to make it in the first place, then it's good. It's unlikely to be as long-term stable as fibreglass, so probably won't fit all use-cases, but "cheap crap" could definitely use it - all the stuff that was never going to last in the first place - toys, games, novelties etc.
As for leaving the traces and chips behind - that's sort of the point. The traces probably aren't terribly recyclable, but at least you could separate them from everything else and dispose of them separately (unless they're decent copper traces, in which case you definitely can do something with them). If there are any gold contacts anywhere on the board, then obviously you'd be able to extract that pretty easily. The chips would come off too - without overly heating them. There's a chance you could even re-use those chips if you wanted. If not, then you can divide them out by type and recycle or dispose of them separately.
As with everything, it's not a solution to every problem, but it is a solution to some problems - and as such, it helps get us to our environmental goals, at least by some amount. Not trying is the only way to guarantee failure though.
Taking planned obsolescence to a new level (Score:4, Interesting)
New part of the EULA: Warranty void if used in tropical areas (because in the humidity there, the PCB probably dissolves before the 2 year warranty period is over).
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And rest assured that it will come in enough plastic wrapping to ensure it stays dry until you open it so the time can start ticking the second you take it out of the box.
Humidity controlled? Hell, anything but "Sahara desert" humidity levels will probably sooner or later kill this. That's probably also the plan.
My only hope is that they'll try to greenwash their crap and put huge "biodegradable PCB inside" stickers on it so you can avoid it.
bye bye retrocomputing (Score:1)
Or using this in the tropics.
IP68 rating: (Score:4, Funny)
Zero.
Re:IP68 rating: (Score:4, Insightful)
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A hot bath and a good scrub with a paint brush brings them up good as new.
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A hot bath and a good scrub with a paint brush brings them up good as new.
Yup! Good as they day before they were born!
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It is actually IP00
https://www.iec.ch/ip-ratings [www.iec.ch]
So, double-zero.
Don’t spill your coffee on it (Score:4, Interesting)
Not only can we have disappearing tech, but it disappears when you spill your coffee or soda on it! Well, maybe not, but even slight exposure, without the acceleration provided by heat, will cause warping over time. And it may poison water ways as fish are extremely susceptible to many foreign pollutants.
Re:Don’t spill your coffee on it (Score:5, Funny)
Not only can we have disappearing tech, but it disappears when you spill your coffee or soda on it!
"This tape recorder will self-destruct in five seconds".
The computers of tomorrow (Score:2)
They'll melt in your mouth... not in your hand
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Just price in the eco-balance already. (Score:1)
We need independent scientific boards that determine the eco-balance of all that we aquire and consume and that cost has to be priced in as an extra tax. Re-evaluate and redetermine every 18-24 months, update the rank list and adjust eco tax based on recent developments.
This is the only way modern society will get an eco turnaround going on a large global and sustainable scale.
If that happens and a circuit board is super poisonous I'm production ( which, IIRC they are) and their price goes through the roof
But how durable? (Score:4, Insightful)
But how durable is that PCB board? How long before it gets brittle and does not work anymore. I have controllers/mice/keyboards from 30 years ago (good old commodore 64/amiga/atari console/NES/etc) that still work fine, but I have a feeling these water soluble PCB's won't work for many years, let alone if they are kept in a humid environment like Miami.
So this might be fine for devices which are only used for a small period of time (maybe medical devices for instance), but I doubt it will be good for devices that you normally use for many years.
And ofcourse what other already suggested, what happens when a cup of coffee spills on it (like keyboad or mice).
Re:But how durable? (Score:4, Insightful)
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But how durable is that PCB board? How long before it gets brittle and does not work anymore. I have controllers/mice/keyboards from 30 years ago (good old commodore 64/amiga/atari console/NES/etc) that still work fine, but I have a feeling these water soluble PCB's won't work for many years, let alone if they are kept in a humid environment like Miami.
For the moment, let's ignore the fact that our current economy is explicitly predicated on rapid planned obsolescence. Let's instead ask "how many people are there who would still use those old computers and gaming consoles in preference to what's available today?".
Sure, there are a few; but most people wouldn't even consider using old digital tech in place of modern devices. Durability is a supply-side issue which works against the short-term best interests of corporations. And corporations primarily chase
Just imagine... (Score:2)
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But (Score:2)
wasn't PCB contamination of ground water a big problem a few decades ago?
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It is logical (Score:1)
We already accepted CO2 as something to be afraid of, something polluting our environment.
Dihydrogen monoxide is the logical next step, an enemy we should fight! Because it will destroy our iPhones and Macs if given time!
How am I supposed to clean my PC now? (Score:2)
No more water wash -- we go back to TCE? (Score:3)
The industry did a lot of work to transition away from harmful trichloroethylene as a PCB wash solvent -- switching to water wash, requiring all parts to be water tolerant. Now the boards are water soluble, what do we use to wash with?
the up-side (Score:1)
WTF? (Score:2)
Oh that'll work out great... (Score:2)
Humidity and heat will only make it worse.
The boards will swell and components will fail.
It's a great idea right up there with exposed bare electrical wiring in a hydrogen lift vehicle...
(Think Hindenburg)
Florida (Score:2)
I have seen that movie before (Score:3)
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They dont say anything about lifetime (Score:2)
This would work for common boards (Score:2)
the perils of pools (Score:2)
Just what we need in Florida!
"Honey, my phone just dissolved!"
"Well babe, don't drop it in the pool again."
Old fogies and close minded people (Score:2)
Good. This is good news. I hope that this technology is applicable in a way that can help reduce production pollution and enhance recycling opportunities where it can. Would this be used in a rugged IoT box outdoors? No. Could it be used in datacenters and for a number of other things? yes.
Backseat skepticism dressed as engineer brainstorming is just close-minded culture at work. Y'all sound like my dad who can't wrap his head around electric vehicles because "people will get stranded" as if being able to c
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Thinking that leasing vs. buying a car has anything to do with its longevity is a huge fallacy. Cars don't go to the junkyard after a lease.
>it'd be crazy to use materials that dissolve
Lots of things dissolve, given the right conditions. Again, in a slashdot conversation, I will assume that the researchers working on this full time have considered humidity and failure rates, and that manufacturers of such tech would have to provide that information to concerned customers.
Datacenters have highly controlle
Water boarding (Score:2)
Did not dissolve (Score:1)
Mercedes Tried this with their Cars (Score:2)
These models "died" sooner than they would have otherwise and Mercedes stopped providing parts for these models. Even still, people have these models that would continue running if the electrical wiring were traditional. Many of these models suffered pre-mature trips to repair shops on the way to the junkyard.
"Think of the Children" & "Protect the Environment" was the cry! But now Mercedes owners are hosed.
Bet this happen
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I hadn't heard about Mercedes doing the Soy wire bit. Toyota did and their cars are famous for critters in the car. Some of their cars if you get into them you get this moist stuff on you. Sometimes droplets. That's mouse urine. They're in the headliner. Honda did the same thing, ditto lexus, and the other jap brands. I think some American companies did it for a short time.
Environmentalists have a long history of causing failures. From the Challenger disaster when they made NASA switch from CFCs in the foam