RESEARCH THEMES AND PROFILES

PILLARS OF TECHNOLOGY

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PILLAR 1

Low-impact materials, manufacturing and designs

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PILLAR 2

Low-power semiconductors and digital design

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PILLAR 3

Closing the loop: recycling and recovery

Cross cutting themes

Sustainable and
green skills

Circular economy and

responsible innovation

PILLAR 1 - Low-impact materials, manufacturing and designs

Researching sustainable materials, fabrication processes, and designs, across circuit boards (PCBs), semiconductor packaging, and integrated system design.

Reducing the overall size, weight and number of materials involved in a design.

Designing for disassembly: ensuring a product is designed so that it can be easily and cost effectively taken apart at the end of life.

Designing for reliability: create products that last longer, clear product level reliability targets, e.g. resistance to accidental drops for mobile devices

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PILLAR 2 - Low-power semiconductors and digital design

Designing low-power and low-carbon systems and designing semiconductors for sustainability across datacentres and AI and unconventional compute.

Designing for sustainability; apply lifecycle assessment and material flow analysis to production or other process in the electronics industry.

Designing for upgradability: being able to upgrade a product as customer’s needs or technology changes.

PILLAR 3 - Closing the loop: recycling and recovery

Recovering precious metals and critical raw materials (CRMs) from finished electronic products; demonstrating cradle-to-cradle circularity.

Designing for recyclability: using materials in the design which can be recycled and recycling processes exist, marking of materials to facilitate manageable waste streams.

Designing for repair: understanding spare parts priority, availability and time frames though ‘Environmentally Centred Maintenance’ programmes.

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Get involved – join us shaping REACT’s future

Get involved with REACT and help close the loop on sustainable electronics. We are interested in creating partnerships with manufacturers, policy makers, public bodies, recyclers and others in the supply chain to scale technologies for low-impact materials, circularity, and energy-efficient designs.

Your support of REACT – whether collaborating on a project, supporting the skills agenda or other types of financial or in-kind investment – can help accelerate solutions that benefit industry, society and the environment.

Ways to get involved

PhD students (internships, co-sponsorship or co-supervision of research, industrial PhDs)

Joint R&D and Innovate UK projects

Outreach, talks, and media interviews

Technical
support

Joint
events

Training courses
& CPD