- October 08, 2025
- By Zsana Hoskins M.Jour. ’25
The massive volume of discarded electronics in the form of smartphones, digital screens and other electronic devices adds up to a global pollution crisis—and less than a quarter of the 62 million tons that comprise this annual load of “e-waste” is ever recycled.
Part of this glut originates from design engineers who prototype electronic circuit boards used in the early stages of product development. Modern prototyping tools allow for the quick production of these temporary testbeds, often with little thought of their end-of-life environmental impacts.
Researchers from the University of Maryland, the University of Notre Dame and the Georgia Institute of Technology are now working to create a printed circuit board with the simplest imaginable recycling process: Drop it in water and let it dissolve.
Dubbed DissolvPCB, the novel fabrication method is low-cost and accessible, and can be created using a standard Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) 3D printer, several of which are in makerspace labs on the UMD campus.
The circuit board uses a water-soluble synthetic polymer known as PVA as the substrate and a liquid metal alloy known as EGaIn as the conductor material. At the end of its life, the PVA is dissolved in water while the EGaIn material gathers into a reusable liquid metal bead that can be easily recovered to fabricate another board.
In its initial testing, the UMD-led multi-institutional team found that its method achieved a 98% material recovery rate.
The researchers presented a paper outlining their method at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) in South Korea, where it won a Best Paper award. DissolvPCB also received Special Recognition for Sustainability in the Demos category at UIST. In addition, the researchers have released an open-source plug-in for designing recyclable electronics.
This recovery method for printed circuit boards could be a first step in rethinking how electronics used for computing are manufactured and recycled, said Zeyu Yan, a fifth-year computer science Ph.D. student at UMD who was lead author of the study.
The team’s broader goal is to have circuit boards used for smartphones or larger devices produced in the same locale where the device’s final assembly takes place, reducing the impact of fragile global supply chains.
“Eventually, our vision is that all the materials that go into these computational devices can be locally produced and locally recycled,” Yan said.
The DissolvPCB technology could also lower the cost barrier for sustainable printed circuit board production, said Huaishu Peng, an assistant professor of computer science who is Yan’s academic adviser.
Peng, who has an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), said that anyone with access to an FDM 3D printer and the inexpensive materials used by the UMD team can quickly start making their own recyclable circuit boards.
“I hope to convince people that this approach is not only more sustainable, but could also be more economically beneficial for them,” Peng said.