One-Pot and Closed-Loop Recycling of Biomass-Derived Soft Electronics Toward Zero e-waste

The rapidly expanding soft electronics market has raised critical sustainability concerns. Most petrochemical-based polymers used in soft electronics incur considerable CO₂ emissions during their production, and the complex architecture of these devices further hinders recycling. To address these challenges, the development of bio-based and efficiently recyclable materials is essential for reducing the carbon footprint and enabling closed-loop recovery. This study proposes a sustainable design strategy for scalable chemical recycling via a one-pot separation process. Bio-based materials, including a lipoic acid-derived elastomer as the deformable substrate and a gelatin-based hydrogel as the ionic conductor, are employed along with liquid metal and MXene to construct soft electronic devices. At the end of life (EoL), these devices can be fully disassembled through simple immersion in a recovery solution, taking advantage of the preservation of the intrinsic chemical and physical characteristics of each component to enable efficient one-pot recovery of raw materials, as well as allowing solvent reuse. Materials recovered from discarded soft electronics devices are reused to fabricate identical or other types of devices with performance comparable to that of their pristine counterparts. This strategy offers conceptual insights for the practical recycling of multi-component products, highlighting sustainable design principles.