Learn how researchers at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology turn trash printed circuit boards (PCB) into high-quality glucose sensors, not only recycling e-waste but also changing ways of diabetes care.
Turning Trash into Treasure
With more and more devices being used in the world, managing e-waste is becoming a global concern. Conventional PCB recycling is usually expensive, cumbersome and environmentally hazardous.
But what if all that e-waste could be turned into a resource instead? And that’s just what a team of researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have achieved. Now, they have repurposed copper from PCBs recycled using a partially laser-based technique into high-performance glucose sensors.
For this purpose, the team developed a unique material comprising of heterogeneous copper oxide (h-CuxO) nano skeletons using laser-induced transfer mechanism, by selectively removing and reclaiming the incorporated copper in the PCBs. Not only this successfully established a sustainable way to manage e-waste, h-CuxO electrodes could also be key to non-enzymatic glucose sensing — a pivotal tool in diabetes management.
Diabetes Monitoring Revolutionized
Traditional approaches to sensing glucose have usually included enzymatic sensors, which are not only costly but also tend to degrade over time. The h-CuxO electrodes are comfortable far better as a non-enzymatic glucose sensor by the research team than it is a signaling mechanism.
The h-CuxO-EA electrodes achieved the highest sensitivity among all the tested electrodes, 9.893 mA mM-1 cm-2 (R2=0.996) whereas their detection limit is a remarkable 0.34 µM which can accurately detect very small changes in blood glucose level and therefore these electrodes are suitable for real time monitoring of blood glucose level).
But the team went even farther. They also now have a handheld electrochemical workstation that extracts glucose concentrations. The small, portable device improves the user experience overall and lays the groundwork for sensors to be used easily in day-to-day life, letting any individual take control of their own health.
Conclusion
Despite the research group’s discovery about turning e-waste into high-quality glucose sensors having broad and meaningful consequences. They showed that interdisciplinary team collaboration could address the dual challenges of e-waste and non-invasive glucose monitoring with a sustainable solution, several orders of magnitude more significant than existing approaches. This breakthrough feature could change diabetes care forever and one day lead to a more sustainable environment with less waste if all goes well.
