End-of-life organic electronics: which sustainable models?

In the scenario of an ever-growing organic electronics market, the contribution of this technology to waste from electrical and electronic equipment should not be neglected. To retrieve most of this waste, it is important to consider environmental, safety, and health issues of products’ end-of-life phase as early as in the design phase. The advantage of early identification is that proactive measures can be taken to diminish the environmental impacts in each step of the products life cycle. Environmental risks of organic materials need to be investigated in fate and ecotoxicity studies as well as environmental benefits and losses of the devices in life cycle assessments. The aim of this chapter is to identify what needs to be considered when the organic electronics becomes waste. To contribute to a truly sustainable technology, the possibility for recycling the device components and the hazards of landfilling (i.e., metal leaching) will be discussed. Furthermore, the factors to be considered in the end-of-life phase of organic electronics will be analyzed. To better understand the environmental risks and losses of organic electronics, some key environmental issues of established electronic technologies are first discussed in brief. Next, strategies for environmental-friendly organic electronics are indicated.