- September 18, 2026
- By Samuel Malede Zewdu
A recyclable circuit board developed in part by researchers at the University of Maryland received an honorable mention in Fast Company’s 2026 Innovation by Design Awards, announced on Monday.
Department of Computer Science Associate Professor Huaishu Peng, Zeyu Yan Ph.D. ’26 (the study’s first author) and collaborators from the Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Notre Dame are working on DissolvPCB, which was recognized in the student category.
The water-soluble device aims to solve an electronic waste problem: Before an electronic device reaches its final form, engineers may build and test multiple versions of its circuit board. Once those prototypes are no longer needed, recovering their materials and electronic components can be difficult.
Instead of using conventional circuit board materials, DissolvPCB uses a water-soluble plastic called polyvinyl alcohol, or PVA, as its base and a liquid metal alloy to conduct electricity. When a board is no longer needed, it can be placed in water. The PVA dissolves, while the liquid metal forms into a bead that can be collected. Electronic components can also be removed and reused. In testing, the researchers reported recovering more than 98% of the materials used to make the boards.
The Fast Company recognition follows a Best Paper Award for the research at the 2025 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.
“This award feels different because it comes from the international design community,” Peng said. “It reflects our goal for this research to break down disciplinary silos and be truly interdisciplinary.”
Yan plans to continue his research on recyclable electronics as a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech.
“Electrification and smartification have been going on for decades, and that will continue with advances in AI and platform technologies,” Yan said. “That also means we’re going to need a lot more electronics and have a lot more e-waste to deal with. We don’t want sustainability to slow that progress down. With such projects, we’re trying to make it practical to manufacture, recover and remake electronics locally.”