Good point but perhaps coatings or impregnated fire retardant compounds can be utilized?

I'll never forget the smell of paper phenolic PCB's releasing their magic smoke.

That is SI? Well metric. Sounds like the liganization process uses electricity to create. There’s similar units used in electrochemistry to indicate how much energy is required.

10 kilowatts is 10,000 watts, which is 10,000 joules per second. So... 10,000 joules per second per hour per kilogram. Wait... What? What in the hell does "10kW/h" mean?!

Hopefully they meant kWh. Kilowatt-hours per kg makes a ton more sense. That's just a measure of energy spent per unit of mass produced, right?

(P.S.: though all things considered, it seems a shame that we use kilowatt-hours instead of something simpler like kilojoules... but I guess that would be harder to intuit in some cases?)

I’ve heard the rayon process, which can take (m)any natural fiber source and convert it into something vaguely like a synthetic silk, has quite a pollution footprint. The more you have to process the fibers to be like a niche or synthetic fiber the more it becomes greenwashing.

Method Inc went through a phase where they made containers out of virgin materials because the overall ecological footprint was several times better than the best we could hope for plastic recycling, and that was before we found out plastic recycling is half sham. A lot of the trick was making thinner containers out of specialty materials that were lower volume than the waste stream from plastic recycling. Eventually they figured out a recyclable material that is as light as the disposable ones, so they get the best of both worlds. Unfortunately they only use those for hand soap refills.

Yup, this was also what irked me in the rationale of this paper: Combatting e-waste is a good cause, but this is not what the paper is doing - it's alleviating some of the harmful side-effects of e-waste.

The root cause that I'd like to see addressed is an industry that has incentives to churn out unrepairable throwaway electronics. But stuff like this that try to greenwash e-waste would make it less likely that the root cause is addressed, not more.

Jaw dropped on reading this. The biodegradable Mercedes harnesses of the 90s followed the Volvo harnesses of the 80s (iirc). I thought we'd worked that out of the automotive engineering world by now. I'm not funded by the petroleum or rubber industry, yet i also can't help but wonder what would drive technical product managers to make a notable error? Wiring issues in cases aren't cheap problems to fix, nor do they fix themselves, nor increase longevity...

I'd expect the loss coefficient (tan d) to be terrible. Cellulosics hold onto water quite well. You will not have a good time pushing anything high-speed through this kind of board.

I would say the only practical application would be disposable things like PCBs in single-use vape pens. (Which are pretty environmentally offensive on other levels anyway.)