Can a Smartphone be Sustainably Manufactured?
by Christina Cyr, CEO
Since 2015, I have been working at dTOOR Inc. SPC and actively searching for ways to sustainably manufacture smartphones like The Cyrcle Phone 4G LTE to reduce the pollution of our environment and maximize our limited material resources. This post will cover some of the problems and solutions I have uncovered, in hopes that they may benefit your corporation as well.
PCB Recycling
Can printed circuit boards (PCBs) be recycled in the USA?
My first thought was to find out how our main component, the printed circuit board (PCB) could be recycled. In my lifetime, circuit board production has exploded. I have witnessed collections of electronic waste, or “e-waste”, piling up at alarming rates all around me: at home, at school, at work, and beyond. In fact, the total weight of electronics consumption increases globally by 2.5 million metric tons every year. I wanted to make sure that when our company brought yet another consumer electronic device into existence that we would have a plan from day-one for exactly where (and how) that device would finish at the end of its useful life.
Little did I know when I started in 2015, most of our global e-waste is shipped off to less developed countries to pollute their land, infect their water supply, and expose their people to harmful contaminants (documented from the 2015 article from The Guardian to the 2020 article from Borgen Magazine). Although developed nations consume most electrical and electronic equipment (EEE), less developed nations sadly bear the brunt of EEE disposal. Some past reports have estimated that 80% of the US e-waste destined for “recycling” is actually shipped offshore (for a specific reference on this point see p.14 of Exporting Harm, a report compiled by The Basel Action Network (BAN) and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC) on “TechnoTrash”).
Disappointingly, when I began my investigations in 2014, PCB recycling centers did not appear to exist anywhere on the planet outside of Nordic countries. Also, it did not seem environmentally wise to me to use jet/ship fuel to transport our used devices to the Nordics, even if they had been willing to accept them.
Further, I looked into recycling the PCBs ourselves. Since our PCBs contain components which follow the directive for the restriction of hazardous substances (RoHS) in electrical and electronic equipment to protect the environment and public health, and these components are assembled on RoHS boards, we could copy the Nordic “Take Back” recycling centers’ method and melt the components off the board to at least recycle the valuable copper within each board. But there were many details I could not figure out for the rest of the materials.
Could we possibly reuse individual components? PCBs are typically assembled not by hand, but on conveyor belts, with components loaded on reels of tape fed into “Pick n’ Place” machines. Taking the USB Type-C connector as an example, how could we load all the individual USB connectors back onto a tape which could be fed into the assembly machine? This would take a lot of handiwork, and I couldn’t imagine how we could scale this. Nor could I imagine what we would do with the hundreds of parts which were smaller than USB connectors, such as resistors, capacitors, inductors, and so on.
Could we simply melt down all the components and extract the metals? This process seemed sophisticated to me, requiring expert handling of metals, which was an expertise no one on our team yet had.
Fortuitously, in the last few years, private recycling companies indeed have emerged in the United States, particularly for mobile phones. One solution in the USA can be found at https://www.webuyics.com/. However, these existing entities cover only a minute fraction of the millions of metric tons of e-waste created each year. Further, the value of the metals alone which can be recouped from recycling electronics is enormous and largely untapped. Take the element of gold as one example: a ton of phones yields vastly more gold than a ton of ore.
“It takes a ton of ore to get 1g of gold. But you can get the same amount from recycling the materials in 41 mobile phones.”
- European Commissioner for the Environment Janez Potocnik,
as quoted by the BBC article, How much gold can we get from mobile phones?
It also makes good financial sense to reclaim important metals from e-waste, as several megatons (abbreviated as Mt, a metric unit equivalent to 1 million tons, or 1 billion kilograms) can be reclaimed each year.
”E-waste is an 'urban mine', as it contains several precious, critical, and other noncritical metals that, if recycled, can be used as secondary materials. The value of raw materials in the global e-waste generated in 2019 is equal to approximately $57 billion USD. Iron, copper, and gold contribute mostly to this value. With the current documented collection and recycling rate of 17.4%, a raw material value of $10 billion USD is recovered in an environmental sound way from e-waste globally, and 4 Mt of raw materials could be made available for recycling.”
- The Global E-waste Monitor 2020
Lithium Batteries
Recycling this powerful resource
In 2021, consumer electronic original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are panicked about the chip supply shortage. However, I think the next - and vastly more severe - wave will be a panic over the shortage of lithium batteries. As electric vehicles and battery-operated consumer electronics are on the rise, lithium batteries are in increasingly high demand each year. This strong consumer need, combined with material shortages due to earthquakes in Japan, transportation issues due to COVID-19, and trade war policies (which affect more than tariffs which result in increased prices), are forming a supply storm for which we need to prepare.
To top it all off, lithium mining is currently being performed in very few countries, and 2020 production was down worldwide in contrast to 2019. In the USA, the only lithium production in 2020 was from a brine operation in Nevada. To see how few countries control this important resource, you can view details and global statistics from the U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries, January 2021 found at https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-lithium.pdf
Which Countries are Rich in Lithium?
Country | 2019 production | 2020 production | Reserves
Argentina | 6,300 | 6,200 | 1,900,000
Australia | 45,000 | 40,000 | 64,700,000
Brazil | 2,400 | 1,900 | 95,000
Canada | 200 | — | 530,000
Chile | 19,300 | 18,000 | 9,200,000
China | 10,800 | 14,000 | 1,500,000
Portugal | 900 | 900 | 60,000
Zimbabwe | 1,200 | 1,200 | 220,000
The part of lithium mining which impacts the earth the most is the amount of water which is consumed during lithium extraction: approximately 500,000 gallons of water per ton of lithium. For perspective, an average swimming pool holds about 18,000-20,000 gallons of water. This is more than 25 swimming pools full of water to extract each ton of lithium. Fortunately, Lilac Solutions, funded by the Gates Foundation, has recently developed a process for extracting lithium that drastically cuts water use and it hopes to bring that process to manufacturing in the next few years.
However, the greatest hope that I have, is for lithium battery recycling. We can only mine the Earth’s crust for so long without seriously endangering our world even further. Recycling allows us to reuse our waste which is above ground in a more sensible manner. I’ve been following lithium battery recycling efforts for several years now, and fortunately some of that research is finally being implemented in both the USA and Canada.
“One domestic company has recycled lithium metal and lithium-ion batteries since 1992 at its facility in British Columbia, Canada. In 2015, the company began operating the first U.S. recycling facility for lithium-ion vehicle batteries in Lancaster, OH. Seven other companies located in Canada and the United States have begun recycling, or intend to begin recycling, lithium metal and lithium-ion batteries to some degree.“
U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries, January 2021
Enclosures
The Cyrcle Phone Enclosure Design
Multiple materials and models have been explored for the enclosure over the years, from The Cyrcle Phone 2G featured in our our Kickstarter campaign in 2016, to the solid steel demonstration model we delivered in round 2 of Shark Tank, to The Cyrcle Phone 4G LTE with Android 10. At every turn we’ve strived to use compostable or recycled materials. The following discussion of each enclosure material details that journey.
Polylactic Acid (PLA)
For our first phone that we delivered to customers in 2016, The Cyrcle Phone 2G, we used PCBs from another source so I focused simply on the environmental impact of the enclosure. Our enclosures were created from commercially compostable, corn-based PLA filament manufactured by Proto-pasta out of Vancouver, Washington, USA, and 3D-printed locally in the Seattle area by someone I found on 3DHubs. (Unfortunately, 3DHubs no longer links you to a local 3D printer, but they have expanded their services to include injection molding, and can now be found at https://www.hubs.com/.) Since we pointedly used PLA filament for The Cyrcle Phone 2G’s enclosure, you could throw the enclosure in your commercial compost, and use the internal bits to create other maker projects, when you’ve finished using the device as a phone.
However, I later discovered that we are spoiled in the Puget Sound by having access to commercial composting services, and that the advantage of commercial composting services are not shared worldwide. I learned from designers out of Taiwan that the better focus for them was on recycled materials, since those could help offset the trash which had already accumulated. Specifically, they focused on using nylon from recycled fishing nets to create frames for their non-electronic designs.
Nylon
I had already been eyeing Refil’s black nylon Refilament made from Audi and Volvo dashboards which made a big splash in 2015 with Thijs Biersteker’s YouTube videos (unfortunately from June 2021 it appears that Refil is no longer selling via the Re-filament website). I also started keeping an eye on Norway-based Nofir, which in 2019 collected discarded fishing nets from Antarctica’s oceans, dismantled and cleaned them, then sent them off to Italy-based Aquafil to be processed into nylon yarn. However, after testing nylon with our enclosure, I found that nylon was a bit too brittle for our use.
Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS)
ABS is a petroleum-based, non-biodegradable plastic which is used to make many consumer products, from phones to computer cases to kitchen appliance enclosures to Legos. The positive side of ABS is that it does not leach and is non-toxic once it is manufactured. People who 3D print generally avoid ABS because when 3D printed it off-gasses a strong smell and research has indicated that it distributes ultra-microfine particles in the air which can lodge in your lungs and cause adverse health effects. In contrast to nylon, it is more brittle and less flexible. Due to the fact that it is petroleum-based, non-biodegradable, and emits a strong smell and particles during manufacturing, and could crack if dropped, I’ve avoided ABS entirely.
Thermoplastic Polyurethane (TPU)
For The Cyrcle Phone, it was important to me to find materials that could be both 3D printed (as consumers could modify the design themselves) and injection molded (as our company could manufacture more units quickly), and TPU seemed to bridge both manufacturing methods. TPU is a familiar material on the mobile phone scene as the majority of smartphone cases from 2015-2017 were manufactured from TPU. However, the only source of recycled TPU I could find in 2019 was in Switzerland, at Creamelt, which makes recycled thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU-R) from ski boots in white, black, gray, yellow, and red. Unfortunately, this particular TPU turned out to be too flexible for our enclosure, but great for soft buttons. If we find a recycled TPU which is less soft, we will certainly consider it for the entire enclosure as it’s shine is particularly attractive.
Polyethylene Terephthalate Glycol (PETG)
PET is a petroleum-based material, typically used to manufacture water bottles. PETG is simply a glycol-modified variant of PET. The environmental advantage of using PET is that (theoretically) with the right equipment ($$$) we can grind our own water bottles and use the resulting pellets for either injection molding or to melt into filament strands for fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printing.
When I experimented with PETG for The Cyrcle Phone enclosure, it was stringy, brittle, and scratched easily. However, it can be used to print out clear light pipes, to direct LED light from the PCB to where it is needed on the outside of the enclosure. These light pipes are located inside the enclosure, and are thereby protected from the scratches caused by wear and tear.
Carbon
Carbon is featured in a lot of materials, from carbon-strengthened PLA filament for FDM 3D printers, to carbon powder which is sintered together with CO2 for formative SLS 3D printing. The caveat is that carbon attenuates antenna transmissions. So I avoided carbon-based materials for the first two versions of The Cyrcle Phone.
conclusion
Contents of The Cyrcle Phone 4G LTE
The Cyrcle Phone 4G LTE with Android 10 offers to the public in 2021 a commercially compostable PLA enclosure, with soft recycled TPU buttons, and PETG light pipes. Further, we are continuing to pursue PCB recycling, and hope to offer this service when you exchange your current version of The Cyrcle Phone for a newer version. Another advantage is that we can recycle several of the bigger components such as undamaged displays and cameras, and place these in our showroom floor models. As for recycling lithium batteries, we depend on our local recycling centers for this service for now, in hopes that they will eventually be funneled into making recycled lithium batteries.
Even considering these great strides for both our first and second editions of The Cyrcle Phone, the search is not over, and our team continues to look for environmentally friendly materials and designs for future releases. Hopefully by sharing this journey, you and your company may benefit as well.
Postscript 1: Additional Links
For those of you looking for additional environmentally friendly 3D printing material resources for enclosures for your own consumer electronics, here is an email from September 9, 2019 I sent to a Kickstarter representative who had inquired about sustainable enclosures, which detailed my research up to that point. (Please note that some of these links are dated and may no longer work.)
Thank you so much for putting Seattle as a stop on your tour. I was grateful for how much time you spent here, and how patient you were with everyone. Plus, I appreciated that you took time to look at our prototype for The Cyrcle Phone 4G from last May. I can’t wait for our October prototypes and our new enclosure. Below is a recap of our company’s efforts to search for an environmentally friendly enclosure. Hopefully the information might help others for Kickstarter’s Shapeshift.
Background: as a Social Purpose Corporation with an eye on the circular economy, for dTOOR’s first Kickstarter campaign with our 2G prototype of The Cyrcle Phone we used commercially biodegradable PLA for the 3D-printed enclosures. One of the more favorite options for backers was a light brown color which was a mix of coffee grounds and corn PLA, made by local Proto-Pasta in Vancouver, WA. Unfortunately it smelled like coffee only during printing, but it turned out to look more natural, almost like wood, because of the gradations in the curved base of the design, which our backers really liked. Proto-Pasta also offered to make other customized filaments for us, including PLA mixed with cinnamon or lavender, but we realized after the high heat treatment the filaments might end up looking burnt charred pieces.
For dTOOR’s next phone, The Cyrcle Phone 4G LTE Android, I researched a lot of options. We needed a material which could grow with our Kickstarter campaign if necessary and be 3D printed if we received less than 500 backers, or injection molded if we received more than 500 backers. TPU, ABS, and nylon can fill this gap (but ABS might still be too brittle). Recycled Audi dashboard ABS filament from Refil and recycled ski boot TPU filament from Creamelt were top choices, but neither were available for orders from the USA when I looked at them in May 2018. However, I see now that it is possible to order Refil directly, so I’m glad we had today’s discussion so I could order a sample pack. Recycled nylon filament is just starting to become available, and I have hope for that. 3DFuel in the USA also has some interesting filaments. I also looked into recycled carbon fiber, but was later told it can attenuate the antenna signal.
Refil Audi dashboards video https://youtu.be/GoMy_OLmHl8
Refil green PET review by 3D Printing Nerd Joel Telling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GFQJ-X8eHc
Refil white PET review by Makers Muse (and great example of why we don’t use PET for our phone’s enclosure): https://youtu.be/JWKiUNq8fSw
(Simply cool stuff from Refil’s partner: https://www.betterfuturefactory.com/our-work/)
Creamelt recycled ski boot filaments https://creamelt.com/product-tag/recycling/?v=68746a7280b1
3DFuel Standard samples: https://www.3dfuel.com/shop/sample-box-5-materials-pla-rpetg-dynapurge/
3DFuel Unique samples: https://www.3dfuel.com/shop/sample-box-5-c2renew-composite-materials/
Occasionally MatterHackers will have a recycled filament: https://www.matterhackers.com/store/l/closed-loop-plastics-party-pink-hips-300-025/sk/M2FAQ05H
Postscript 2: Links for makers
Avnet Engineer, former Hackster icon, and active maker (and also the individual who selected our current accelerometer on The Cyrcle Phone 4G back in 2019), Monica Houston recommends the following links.
Soluboard® is a a fully recyclable and biodegradable PCB substrate, created using natural fibres combined with a number of other biodegradable ingredients that once immersed in warm water, will cause the layers of the composite material to delaminate. This allows the natural fibres to be composted, the remaining solution to be disposed of using standard domestic waste water systems and the electronic components to be removed for re-processing. https://www.jivamaterials.com/ We do not use it for The Cyrcle Phone variants as Soluboard® does not allow the number of layers currently required by our PCB, but it may be a solution for your applications.
The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk is a progressive lending library of electronic components.