Search

Papertronics introduce a sustainable, cost‐effective revolution in electronics, especially for the Internet of Things. This research overcomes the traditional challenges of paper's porosity, which has impeded electronic component fabrication and performance. A novel approach that harnesses paper's natural capillary action, combined with hydrophobic wax patterning, to achieve precise vertical integration of electronic components is introduced. This method marks a significant departure from conventional surface deposition techniques. This study demonstrates the successful creation of tunable resistors, capacitors, and field‐effect transistors, embedded within a single sheet of paper. Contrary to previous assumptions that impeded the use of paper, its rough and porous texture as a strategic advantage, facilitating the precise fabrication of intricate electronic components is leveraged. Machine learning algorithms play an important role in predicting and enhancing the performance of these papertronic components. This innovation facilitates the development of compact printed circuit boards with increased circuit density, enabling the integration of diverse analog and digital circuits in either single or multi‐layer paper formats. The resulting papertronic systems exceed performance benchmarks, offering eco‐friendly disposal through biodegradability or incineration. These breakthroughs establish papertronics as a feasible, eco‐friendly alternative in the electronics industry, permitting widespread adoption and continuous innovation in sustainable electronic solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sensors and transducers enable the robots' movements and interactions with humans and the environment. Particularly, tactile and motion sensors, even those inspired by the human skin, often miss many of its essential features. Indeed, the materials that constitute such sensors are often rigid and lack self‐healing and biodegradability. Furthermore, the large‐scale diffusion of these technologies propelled by robots spread in many aspects of the lives, from industrial to household settings, contributes heavily to the electronic and robotic waste problem. Recycling strategies for materials for robotics sensors are thus pivotal for future development. This work proposes self‐healable, recyclable, and biodegradable electrically conductive coatings. These coatings are based on conductive inks that combine graphene nanoplatelets and carbon nanofibers with a soft biodegradable vitrimer binder and are realized by spray coating. The use of the vitrimer ensures satisfying adhesion to diverse substrates, flexibility, conformability, self‐healing, and recyclability of the conductive coating. This material is a sustainable alternative to standard conductive inks for flexible electronics and soft robotics. Indeed, tests for the live monitoring of SoftHand3, the grasping system of many worldwide diffused robots, have yielded promising results. The use of biodegradable ingredients and the possibility of recycling makes it an appealing material to face the sustainability issue of today's electronics and robotics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plastics are now causing challenging environmental issues, especially electronic waste (E‐waste) and microplastics. While no single solution exists to address all these complex problems, superworms' ingestion behavior toward plastics provides an innovative way to reduce plastic pollutions. Here, it is demonstrated that poly(3,4‐ethylene dioxythiophene):poly(styrene sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS)/montmorillonite (MMT) composites are biodegradable with versatile multifunctionalities originating from natural nacre‐inspired layered nanostructures. While their physical performances are modulated interdependently, eco‐biodegradability of the MMT/PEDOT:PSS composites are confirmed by the superworm's ingestion behaviors and their chemical changes after digestion. The electrically conductive composites with PEDOT:PSS also exhibit excellent mechanical properties, thermal stability, flame retardancy, long‐term water stability, flexibility, and electrochemical properties. Combined with these inherent multifaceted properties, the eco‐biodegradable features of the MMT/PEDOT:PSS composites open a new direction to use electronic materials for emerging eco‐friendly applications, including green‐electronics, bioelectronics, and edible‐electronics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Photonic and electronic devices currently face challenges in terms of improved efficiency of energy harvesting and light emission, renewable energy and materials, and the development of eco‐friendly materials. Owing to the emergence of world‐wide concerns about environmental degradation and the ensuing regulations, demand for environmentally friendly technology has been increasing in recent years. As the current technology of creating electronics and photonics devices based on semiconductors heavily relies on processes that produce a series of hazardous chemicals, development of renewable and eco‐friendly materials has become immensely important. Two of the most promising materials in this respect are silk and paper, and this progress report will investigate their unique properties for both photonic and electronic applications. These two natural materials have been intensively studied in the last decades and have shown promising aspects for use in future green technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing new energy technology is a significant challenge in the context of the energy crisis. As a novel energy conversion device to convert mechanical energy into electricity, the triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) has attracted significant attention in the past few years. The choice of component materials directly affects the cost, environmental performance, output performance, and preparation process of a TENG. In recent years, cellulose paper has become an ideal material for fabricating a TENG due to its lightweight, biodegradability, low‐cost, high flexibility, environmental friendliness, porosity, and easy modification. Cellulose paper‐based TENG has become a hot topic in the field of green energy. This paper systematically summarizes the research progress of the cellulose paper‐based TENG. The advantages of cellulose paper as raw material to fabricate a TENG, followed by introducing the different roles of cellulose paper in paper‐based TENGs, are first discussed. Then the recent progress in energy storage, performance optimization methods, hybridization, and applications of cellulose paper‐based TENGs is successively elaborated. Finally, some perspectives and challenges for the future development of cellulose paper‐based TENG are discussed to provide guidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of portable electronic devices has resulted in an increase of e‐waste that is generated after their use. One of the most hazardous components in e‐waste are batteries, due to their content of heavy metals and toxic chemicals. Fuel cells and redox flow batteries have been recognized as more sustainable alternatives to Li‐based batteries for powering portable applications. Although they provide comparable energy and power densities, they still face some challenges because they rely on proton exchange membranes based on nonenvironmentally friendly, high‐priced perfluorosulfonic acid copolymers that require energy‐intense manufacturing and recycling procedures. In this work, eco‐friendly and sustainable biopolymer electrolyte membranes (BioPEMs) are synthesized from biopolymers like chitosan, cellulose, and starch. These BioPEMs bring forth advantages in performance, sustainability, and cost. Additionally, they present good chemical and mechanical stability, high ionic conductivity in the same order of magnitude as Nafion membranes. Two alternatives of cellulose–chitosan based BioPEMs are successfully applied into primary redox batteries using benign eco‐friendly redox chemistries, delivering open circuit voltages above 0.75 V and power output up to 2.5 mW cm−2. These results demonstrate BioPEMs capability to improve biodegradable batteries in sectors requiring a transient electrical energy, such as environmental monitoring, agriculture, or packaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper a novel approach is presented to prepare flexible and transparent conducting films, whose components can be separated and recovered via a recycling process. The fabrication method is based on low power sputtering of ultrathin gold layers on sodium alginate free‐standing films. The resulting foils are thin, easy to handle, and shape, while showing good conductive properties. In particular, they show excellent resistance to mechanical stress, like bending or rubbing, and are highly stable in ambient atmosphere over several months. Therefore they may represent a very promising candidate to be employed in green electronics, thanks to the reduced energy consumption required for their fabrication, the absence of toxic components or chemicals that are derived from oil, and the possibility to disassemble the devices at the end of their life in environmentally friendly conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing multi‐functional green conductive materials is instrumental in reducing electronic waste. In article 1800069, Pietro Cataldi, Ilker S. Bayer and co‐workers use crop ingredients and graphene to produce flexible conductors using the bio‐advantaged approach. The conductive nanocomposite can be regarded as "plant‐e‐tronics" with promising applications such as electromagnetic interference shielding, wireless antennas and photovoltaics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's fast‐paced and well‐connected world, consumer electronics are evolving rapidly. As a result, the amount of discarded electronic devices is becoming a major health and environmental concern. The rapid expansion of flexible electronics has the potential to transform consumer electronic devices from rigid phones and tablets to robust wearable devices. This means increased use of plastics in consumer electronics and the potential to generate more persistent plastic waste for the environment. Hence, today, the need for flexible biodegradable electronics is at the forefront of minimizing the mounting pile of global electronic waste. A "bioadvantaged" approach to develop a biodegradable, flexible, and application‐adaptable electronic components based on crop components and graphene is reported. More specifically, by combining zein, a corn‐derived protein, and aleuritic acid, a major monomer of tomato cuticles and sheellac, along with graphene, biocomposite conductors having low electrical resistance (≈10 Ω sq−1) with exceptional mechanical and fatigue resilience are fabricated. Further, a number of high‐performance electronic applications, such as THz electromagnetic shielding, flexible GHz antenna construction, and flexible solar cell electrode, are demonstrated. Excellent performance results are measured from each application comparable to conventional nondegrading counterparts, thus paving the way for the concept of "plant‐e‐tronics" towards sustainability. Sustainable materials for consumer electronics are imperative to address the ever‐increasing e‐waste problem. Here a simple bioadvantaged plant electronics material is shown by direct mixing/polymerization of crop proteins monomers in the presence of graphene to create various flexible plant‐e‐tronics applications such as wireless antennas, electromagnetic interference shielding, and photovoltaics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]