REFORM

The EU-funded REFORM project aims to tackle the environmental and sustainability issues around conventional surface mounted and embedded functional electronics by using eco-design principles to produce green printable electronics that meet the demands of multiple industries and sectors as well as societal and environmental needs for sustainability.

While each electronic device we own contains very limited amounts of critical materials, their vast production scale means that the cumulative environmental impact of e-waste is substantial, particularly if components are embedded in ways that make recycling extremely difficult or uneconomic. REFORM seeks to address this problem through the development of more sustainable electronic building blocks for use in electronics systems together with methods for their efficient recovery at their end-of-life. Green, bio-derived de-bondable adhesives, a suite of organic conductive inks and bio-based flexible substrates will be used to develop three prototypes: a green smart logistics tag, a green embedded wireless sensor and a micro supercapacitor.

The project brings together world-renowned academics, non-profit RTOs, industrial associations, private SME partners and large firms from eight countries across Europe. By combining the consortium’s unique and complementary expertise, REFORM aims to give Europe an innovation lead in green functional electronics, enhancing European competitiveness, and helping meet the ambitions for the European Green Deal.

CIDETEC’S role in the project:

CIDETEC Surface Engineering is the coordinator of the project and leader of one WP. More specifically, CIDETEC will work on the development of sustainable conductive inks and cellulose-based electrolyte inks, as well as recyclable thermoset 3R composites to be used as substrates.