A British company leading the charge against environmentally destructive throwaway technology has opened a state-of-the-art ReCYCLE™ facility to meet increasing demand from OEM customers.
The unique £1.5 million facility is powered using sustainable electronics innovator In2tec’s ReUSE® and ReCYCLE™ technologies, allowing the company to undertake component recovery and remanufacturing on behalf of customers.
Emma Armstrong, Sustainable Electronics Ambassador of In2tec, said:
“Component recovery at scale needs a different approach at the design and manufacturing phase. Electronic components are often intended for 20+ years of life, but on average are used for less than 4 years. More than a billion mobile phones and 300 million laptops are produced annually, and our appetite for all things tech is increasing rapidly. Reusing viable components brings substantial financial and environmental benefits”.
Many companies offer services to desolder high value components, something OEMs have looked to for decades, but it is a costly, low-yield process. Stress caused to desoldered components by the reclamation process makes it difficult to guarantee viability, and widely used methods of recovering materials are inefficient, destroy value, and are costly in terms of emissions and energy.
“The cost heavily outweighs the gain, hence why we now face a significant ewaste problem, says Emma. Electronics recycling recovers a fraction of the precious materials used to manufacture them, and the valuable components are lost. Millions of tonnes of ewaste are also “recycled” informally and unsafely in the developing world each year”
Ewaste is considered hazardous waste as it contains toxic materials and can produce toxic chemicals when recycled inappropriately. Many of these toxic materials are known or suspected to cause harm to human health, and several are included in the 10 chemicals of public health concern, including dioxins, lead and mercury. Inferior recycling of ewaste is a threat to public health and safety.
“The world needs an effective, scalable solution to ewaste. We need continued advancements in technology for sectors such as healthcare, while reducing the impact on the climate via emissions and destructive mining! OEMs also need ways to secure their supply chain, mitigate obsolescence, and lower the cost of developing and manufacturing new products.
That’s exactly what ReUSE® and ReCYCLE™ technologies are built to enable: electronics that can be non-destructively “unzipped” so components can be recovered in an unstressed, reusable condition, supporting repair, spares, and second-life deployment.
ReUSE® and ReCYCLE™ no market equivalent and combines recoverability by design with an ultra-low energy recovery process. It is a versatile tech that suits all substrates from FR4, Al, PET, PI, and Biomaterials, and can be manufactured at an In2tec facility or licenced by OEMs and CEMs.
Some benefits from implementation include:
- Creates an internal buffer stock of validated parts for repair, refurbishment, and next-build requirements.
- Avoids lead time volatility by supplementing procurement with reclaimed components.
- Reduces exposure to raw material price swings (e.g., precious metals embedded in electronics).
- Mitigates costly obsolescence and failures by recovering usable components from products at end-of-useful-life (or from yield fallout) instead of scrapping them.
- Significantly reduces development costs by requiring one kit of parts per PCBA, with components recovered and reused across design iterations.
“This is a world-first – the only true electronics recycling facility for the recovery and reuse of components. The production and recovery lines are in place to support our customers and can also be demonstrated for OEMs looking to implement a solution in their own facilities under licence.”
For Scotland’s tech and manufacturing base, the model is directly relevant. With growing clusters in semiconductors, space, renewables and advanced manufacturing – and increasing pressure to cut waste and secure critical components – a recovery-led, closed-loop approach of this kind could help Scottish OEMs and CEMs:
- Build internal stocks of validated parts to support repair, upgrade and second-life deployment
- Reduce exposure to volatile global supply chains and raw material price swings
- Align with national net zero and circular economy targets while reducing costs over the product lifecycle
In2tec’s signature ReUSE® and ReCYCLE™ comprise a closed-loop process allowing manufacturers to remove components from existing electronics at the end of their useful life and reuse them. ReUSE® is a suite of materials, processes and design principles used to manufacture printed circuit board assemblies (PCBAs). ReCYCLE™ is the ultra-low energy process for unzipping PCBAs – the foundation of nearly all technology – to the original bill of materials (BoM).
The technology’s versatility allows global commercialisation and a vast reduction in the overall energy used to manufacture and process when it reaches its end of life – something that is impossible when using conventional circuit board processes or materials.
