Every year, the world throws away about 62 million metric tons of electronic waste. Despite the valuable metals in electronics, we recycle less than a quarter of what we produce. At the end of the day, our growing use of electronics leaves behind ever-growing mountains of discarded gadgets that pollute and leach toxic chemicals into the environment.
If you own a smartphone, laptop, or smart speaker, you’re part of the cycle. But at the end of the day, there’s not much you can do as a consumer because there are no real alternatives to electronic boards.
Most of these devices rely on printed circuit boards (PCBs) made of copper, fiberglass, and epoxy resin. These are the flat, usually green board inside your gadgets that holds all the tiny electronic parts, connecting them with thin copper lines. PCBs are durable and efficient, but they’re notoriously difficult to recycle. Once the boards are soldered and laminated, breaking them apart for reuse becomes a costly and polluting process. That’s why so many electronics end up shredded or exported to countries with lax environmental laws.
This is where the new technology comes in.
Researchers from the University of Maryland, Georgia Tech, and the University of Notre Dame have unveiled a new type of PCB. DissolvPCB is a fully recyclable circuit board. Instead of fiberglass and epoxy, they print the boards using polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), a biodegradable plastic that simply melts away when submerged in water. The copper traces are replaced with liquid metal (a gallium-indium alloy) that flows into printed channels to create conductive pathways.
When you no longer need it, just dunk it into water. The PVA substrate disappears, leaving behind reusable liquid metal beads and intact electronic components that can be dried and reused.
A Circuit Board You Can Dissolve
This isn’t the first alternative PCB design researchers have proposed. Other teams have suggested paper-based boards, wood-derived composites, or even printing circuits on mushrooms. What makes DissolvPCB appealing is its simplicity.
Firstly, it’s very easy to recycle.
The researchers demonstrated recycling by placing a small magnetic field detector board in a dish of water. At room temperature, it took about 36 hours for the board to fully dissolve. With heat and stirring, that dropped to less than an hour. Once dissolved, the liquid metal and components naturally separated. The PVA was dried, ground up, and re-extruded into new filament for 3D printing.
The other innovation is in the production phase. The team designed this system with commonly used tools: a standard FDM 3D printer, readily available PVA filament, and liquid metal you can mix from ingredients ordered online. Basically, all the tools required are already widely available, you don’t need a specialized lab or anything like that.
The researchers even created a software plugin for FreeCAD that converts traditional circuit designs into 3D-printable models. That means hobbyists and engineers can start making dissolvable boards with almost no learning curve.
Is It Really Eco-Friendly?
Electronics have become a major driver of pollution. Making a single smartphone consumes raw metals mined at great environmental and social cost. Recycling those devices is a global challenge, with most e-waste still burned or dumped. The pollution is just one part of the problem, the other is that we don’t have a very cheap way to reuse these materials.
Even where the recycling infrastructure does exist, it’s bulky and centralized. With this type of approach, even small labs or companies could reclaim parts and materials. This “local recycling” model reduces energy use and eliminates toxic chemicals from the process, not to mention it would be a great boon for sustainable electronics prototyping.
To prove the environmental case, the team ran a life cycle assessment comparing DissolvPCB to a standard board. The results were dramatic. DissolvPCB reduced greenhouse gas emissions by an order of magnitude and slashed other environmental impacts (like toxicity and fossil fuel use) significantly. The difference comes down to extracting the materials used in the original process.
Around 98% of the materials used in the process were recovered for reuse. It’s not perfect, but it’s a major step forward.
A New Form of Electronics?
The materials used to create this type of PCB aren’t new, but the innovation comes in how they’re integrated into a functional, multi-layer PCB design. The researchers optimized nozzle sizes, channel dimensions, and wall thickness to ensure the boards conducted electricity reliably while remaining easy to dissolve. They even built custom glue from PVA pellets to secure components without compromising recyclability.
They built three demo devices: a Bluetooth speaker with a double-layer dissolvable circuit board, an electronic fidget cube with 3D-printed circuits and LEDs, and a self-heating three-finger gripper that bends when powered. All of them were easily recycled and reused.
The team even designed new kinds of electronics. Existing PCBs are rigid, but these new boards are 3D printed so they can integrate electronics into curved or sculptural objects. One prototype featured a 3D electronic fidget toy where LEDs lit up in response to joystick inputs, all embedded inside a cube.
But this approach does have its trade-offs. In particular, DissolvPCB boards are bulkier than current boards because the printed channels can’t be as fine as etched copper traces. Devices with strict size constraints (like smartphones or wearables) might not adopt this tech right away. Water solubility also means the boards can’t be exposed to moisture, though protective casings could solve that.
So, for now, DissolvPCB is best suited for prototyping, education, and small-batch manufacturing. But as 3D printing resolutions improve, it could scale to mainstream electronics production. Furthermore, because the team worked in an open source fashion and opened up the process for everyone, continued innovation is much more likely. Other researchers or even amateurs could try to improve the process and make it better and scalable.
Instead of gadgets that linger in landfills, we could have devices that disappear, leaving behind only reusable parts and raw materials. For a world drowning in discarded tech, that’s a much-needed lifeline.
You can read the study in its entirety here.
