Anicet Mbida 06:54, September 14, 2022

Anicet Mbida delivers to us every morning what is best in terms of innovation.

This Wednesday, he is interested in an invention beneficial to the environment.

Scientists from the University of Berkeley in the United States have created a compostable and fully biodegradable electronic board.

This morning, good news for the environment.

We have succeeded in creating fully biodegradable electronic boards.

Very good news, because we are literally overwhelmed with electronic waste.

I read a United Nations report that sounds the alarm: every year, more than 50 million tons of televisions, computers, telephones and other household appliances are thrown away.

50 millions !

It's colossal.

Problem: their printed circuits are mainly plastic, sometimes covered with toxic products.

So it is a major challenge to manage to make them biodegradable.

And that's what scientists from the University of Berkeley in the United States have succeeded in doing: a completely compostable electronic card.

That is to say, we could throw it in nature.

It will dissolve completely, in a few weeks, without there being the slightest risk of pollution.

In these electronic cards, there were also precious metals: gold, platinum… What happened to them?

That's right, they're in the chips and transistors soldered to the board.

And the interest of this new way of creating printed circuits is that it allows them to be recovered very easily.

And that too is important.

Because there is more gold today in a computer dump than in a gold mine.

I will quote the figures from ADEME (the Environment Agency): by digging a ton of ore, we manage to recover between 4 and 5 g of gold.

While in a ton of electronic components, there are up to 200 g.

Forty times more!

So it is also a challenge to simply separate these components, to be able to recover their precious metals.

In electronic devices, there are also batteries and screens… Can we recycle them or make them biodegradable?

It is true that it remains a problem.

But we are starting to make progress.

We now have fully biodegradable battery prototypes.

Soon, it will be the turn of the screens.

So we hope that one day, with all these technologies, we will put an end to electronic discharges.

That we easily recover all the gold and platinum that there is inside, before transforming all the rest into compost.