Recent advances in green printing materials and technologies

Green printing has emerged as a powerful additive manufacturing strategy for fabricating functional materials and devices over large areas, while reducing material consumption, processing steps, production costs and chemical waste. By precisely controlling droplet movement, fluid transport, and interfacial assembly, printing enables the direct patterning of highly integrated structures on various substrates. Over the past five years, rapid advances in functional ink design, printing processes, device integration, and artificial intelligence (AI) have accelerated the transition of printed materials and technologies from laboratory demonstrations towards industrial manufacturing. Nevertheless, their broader deployment remains limited by persistent trade-offs between resolution, throughput, scalability and reproducibility. In this review, we first summarize recent developments in inkjet printing, template-guided printing, 3D printing, transfer printing, roll-to-roll manufacturing and other emerging printing techniques, with emphasis on improving material utilization, simplifying processing procedures, and achieving large-scale production. We then discuss printable functional materials, including quantum dots, nanomaterials, perovskites, polymers, and their composites, highlighting the roles of material composition, rheology, and stability in determining their final functionalities. On this basis, we introduce representative applications in electronics, photonics, biomedical engineering, microfluidics and soft robotics. We further examine the effect of AI on green printing in various aspects such as ink formulations, process optimization, structural design, and closed-loop control. Finally, we discuss the challenges and future prospects for achieving green and sustainable printing in practical use.