Beyond future proof – circularity in electronics
Circularity and design-for-reuse have been niche concepts in electronics for many years. However there is an increasing focus on the approach for electronics, with several groups promoting the philosophy to boost sustainability across the industry.
Fairphone in the Netherlands has been at the forefront of reusable, repairable electronics. Since the launch of its first modular, repairable phone back in 2013, the cycle of new designs has increased, with the Fairphone Generation 6 launched just last week.
More recently Framework in the US has developed laptops and even a desktop AI PC with reusable parts.
The move to design for reuse is also being driven by regulations. The Ecodesign Act and Right to Repair Act in the European Union are mandating more commitment to sustainable production and longer lifetime for devices. This is even reaching the AI datacentre. Trooper AI is ‘upcycling’ second hand gaming cards from Nvidia to provide low cost GPU access in datacentres in Germany, France and the Netherlands.
Despite growing investment in sustainability, the world is moving backwards on circularity: the share of recyclable materials in the global economy has dropped from 9% to 6.9% in recent years. Approximately 62 million tons of electronic waste is generated globally, with this figure estimated to rise to 82 million tons in 2030.
Circularity hub
“As we talk with industry too many people are asking ‘how do I do this?’,” says John Mitchell, CEO of the Global Electronics Association, formerly the IPC. The GEA has just launched a circularity hub with hints and tips to guide designers in the ways of reuse.
John Mitchell, GEA
Similarly contract manufacturing giant Jabil has been part of the increasing drive to circularity
“It’s important to us to contribute to the industry as that’s where we can share the lessons we learned,” said Cassie Gruber, director of sustainability business solutions at Jabil, which acts as a contract manufacturer but also makes its own equipment thorough a network of acquisitions.
“There are six pathways that all need to be addressed to create a true circular economy,” she said. “It is simple to create a circular business model but the challenging piece is the circular supply chain.”
“We need to change habits, so its about change management,” she said. But it is also about standards for design and for data. “A big gap is that suppliers across the globe do not encompass sustainability metrics, so we are going through this chaos of transformation.”
Jabil is also working with GEA on developing standards for circularity.
“A lot has to do with reclaiming materials, end of use vs end of life, collaborating with the recycling industry. The electronics industry is set up to build things, not reuse or recycle things. Electronics drives 20% of world trade today and with that there is already concern about the cost and landfill of e-waste,“ says Mitchell.
“A lot of the manufacturers I encounter don’t even realise circularity is even possible let alone the cost savings so we are raising the awareness and highlighting the cost savings. It is change of mindset and I’m seeing that changing. Even five years ago it was regionally different. Just a couple of years ago that changed,” he said.
Reclaiming chips
Gruber points to the acquisition of Retronix for thermal reclamation of embedded chips on PCBA to recycle devices at Jabil.
Cassie Gruber, Jabil
“We do manual and laser re-balling of BGA packaged chips and we offer them with three times life,” she said. Jabil also recycles datacentre equipment for Tier Ones such as cables and components and will reuse racks rather than ship a rack for recycling.
“There’s a lot of options,” she tells eeNews Europe. “At times customers want the chip to be redeployed within their supply chain. In most cases we are reballing the chip, testing it even for manufacturing lines outside of Jabil. In other cases there can be assessments of components, we reclaim two to four chips that have value on the secondary markets, and we work with tier 2 or 3 manufacturers, even brokerage companies, but you have to be careful.”
Jabil is part of the Circular Electronics Partnership and one of the pathways for Design for Circularity. It is also working with 3PL logistics in certain countries that are challenging with logistics for take back programmes to recycle equipment.
“We are looking to build some standards around the circular economy with benchmarking and baselining as well as life cycle assessment (LCA).
Circular Electronics Partnership
Even the US is catching up, with the Circular Electronics Design Guide published by the partnership.
This includes contributions from more than 60 experts and 25 organizations, many in Europe, on strategies for repair, refurbishment, and recycling. This includes contributions from Accenture, Bang & Olufsen, Danfoss, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, ERI, Fairphone, Fraunhofer IZM, Global Electronics Council, Globant, HMD, HP, iFixit, Logitech, Microsoft, Partners For Innovation, Pezy, Philips, the Royal College of Art, Schneider Electric, Signify, Studio Elk, Synapse, TU Delft, and Versuni.
The design guide includes
- A blueprint for building a circular innovation process
- Tools to scale circular initiatives in repair, refurbishment, and recycling
- Insights into creating the enabling conditions for successful circular initiatives
- Case studies showcasing how industry leaders navigate the challenges.
“This guide is one of most comprehensive resources on circular design developed by practitioners for practitioners,” said John Shegerian, Chairman and CEO of ERI, the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition (ITAD) provider and hardware destruction company in the US.
“It is the result of an extensive cross-company effort, and we are proud to have been asked to play a role.”
There are technology solutions for circularity as well as business models. One that comes up regularly is Jiva Materials in the UK, which has developed a printed circuit board that dissolves in water. This dramatically simplifies the dismantling of the boards and the easy recovery of the components. It has worked with Infineon Technologies and PCB maker ICAPE and is raising £2.8m in a seed round including a crowd funding element.
Dissolvable boards
The Jiva Soluboard
The patent protected Soluboard is an alternative rigid PCB laminate with improved environmental credentials that is compatible with two-layer through hole designs. It is manufactured by impregnating natural fibres with a water-soluble polymer and a halogen-free flame retardant. The composite material is then supplied to PCB fabricators as panels of copper clad laminate (CCL) available in a range of sizes and can be taken from bare laminate through to an assembled PCB using equipment available to a standard PCB fabricator.
It is fully compatible with processes including water-based etching, electroplating, drilling, routing and curing.
Another UK company, In2tec, has patented a suite of materials, manufacturing processes, and proprietary design techniques that enable printed circuit board assemblies (PCBAs) to be fully disassembled at end-of-life or for repair. Alongside this ReUSE process, the ReCYCLE process allows these PCBAs to be returned to their original components without damage, allowing the reuse in new products or resale in the second-life market.
The technology has been nominated for the EarthShot awards later in 2025.
Meanwhile data collected by European industrial automation giant ABB over the last four years by ABB Energy Industries Service and its recycling partners shows the amount of electronic waste returned by customers and then sent to landfill reduced by 93 percent since the launch of a Parts Circularity Program. Of 32,000 faulty items processed across the four years, 214.5 kg went to landfill in 2020 but by the end of 2023 this had fallen to 14.2 kg, supporting ABB’s global efforts to enable a more sustainable future.
The initiative focuses on the repair, reuse and recycling of faulty parts to extend their life and help reduce waste and conserve resources that would otherwise be used to manufacture new parts. “The success of this program has already been proven at industrial plants around the world where our customers have service agreements that enable them to play an active role in striving for a circular economy,” said Paul Sundt, Service Segment Manager at ABB Energy Industries.
Automotive electronics
The three year TRansition of the European Automotive SUpply chain towards a circulaR future (TREASURE) project finished last year developing an online platform as well as multiple reconfigured recycling units to help recover the critical metals used in modern car electronics.
Barriers to implementing circular economy practices go beyond the lack of properly equipped recycling facilities. TREASURE developed a framework to connect disassembly, recycling and design actors, and the project created a policy guideline to provide industry players and politicians with needed information.
TREASURE also created the first in-depth assessment of car electronics lifecycle and circularity. A digital platform composed of a four-module toolbox that uses an AI-based scenario assessment tool to compare different perspectives on disassembly processes, recyclability and circularity performance is a major achievement. The automotive industry has responded well to the resources provided by TREASURE, and the platform is seen as the first step in enabling secure information exchange in recycling.
Digital tools are critical to improving automotive electronics, but the recovery of critical materials requires new recycling operations as well. TREASURE built on earlier EU-funded projects to reconfigure a hydrometallurgical processing plant for the recovery of precious, critical and base metals. “The modular hydrometallurgical plant developed in TREASURE is a process fully dedicated to the recovery of precious metals from both obsolete car electronics, LCD displays and IME (in-mould electronics) parts. Specifically, the recovered silver has been reused to produce new IME parts,” said coordinator Paolo Rosa at Milan University.
Another reconfigured process developed by TREASURE involves the deconstruction of PCBs with robotics.
“AI and robotics have been adopted to develop a semi-automated PCB disassembly process dedicated to the recognition of electronic components present on obsolete PCBs and their subsequent desoldering. This improves the recovery rate of materials for the subsequent hydrometallurgical process,” said Rosa.
The project had 15 partners across seven EU countries and produced digital resources to support communication and recovery of critical materials along the automotive industry value chain. It also built on technological solutions to improve recycling so that the materials can be reused in manufacturing electronic car parts, avoiding downcycling of degraded materials.
Digital tools
In the UK, the Digital Innovation and Circular Economy Network Plus (DICE Network+) started in January 2025 to explore how digital technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), can accelerate the shift to a circular economy.
This is led by the University of Exeter in collaboration with eight UK universities and industry partners including the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Arup and SAP, the network aims to address two key challenge areas of embedding circular design principles.
“We know most companies are now invested in both digital transformation and circular economy goals, with half of organisations implementing AI in their infrastructure and 55% of large businesses committed to circularity,” said Professor Fiona Charnley, DICE Network+ Lead and Co-Director of the Exeter Centre for Circular Economy.
“For the UK to meet its ambitions in AI and clean energy, we must embed circular economy principles at the design stage. By connecting partners across sectors, DICE Network+ will help build this capacity across the UK and beyond – creating digital innovations that are sustainable and using those innovations to supercharge the adoption of circular models.”
“We need circularity now because we’re hitting planetary boundaries,” said Darren West, Global Head of Circular Economy Solutions at SAP, during his keynote on agentic AI. “The good news is that circularity drives both sustainability and profit. We’re already seeing how AI can save hours on ESG reporting, or how digital product passports can help track and recover high-value materials. With new regulations like ESPR on the horizon, manufacturers must start designing modular, repairable, and traceable products. That’s where this network can help.”
The three year project starts with a call for demonstrators scheduled for early 2026 and highlights the need for data standards throughout the supply chain for circularity.
“The biggest problem, not just for Jabil, is the synchrony with supply chain and the availability of data sources,” says Gruber at Jabil. “From material declarations to country of origin we have a plethora of data but we didn’t know to put the data in a certain format in one place, We can tackle circular business models all day long but all of that is patching a hole, we need the circular markets and supply chain to connect and the biggest gap is the supply chain alignment,” she says.
www.jabil.com; www.electronics.org; www.jivamaterials.com; www.dicenetworkplus.org; www.abb.com; www.int2tecc.com
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