25 green electronics words for 2025

Hello 2025: 25 words to start the year with #green #electronics and #innovation at heart

Claudine Boeglin Latest 20 January 2025 9 minutes read

#AlmaScience peppers your dinner table with bioelectronic concepts and words that bring green tech and innovation to the forefront of your conversations this year.

Words matter

Words shape our understanding, connect us, reflect the times we live in, and open doors to new fields of knowledge. They introduce scientific ideas that can inspire changes in behavior, aspirations, and even societal values.

#green #tech #innovation

At AlmaScience, these three words guide us.

Green encompasses the natural world of animals, plants, and minerals. It includes atmospheric and seismic events (e.g., hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, droughts, landslides). It also integrates the behavior of living organisms, time, and climate as processes generating erosion and fossilization. Nature provides beauty and sustenance, stillness and movement. As an ecosystem tempered by seasons, it grants time to seed and harvest, as well as time for the soil to rest. Nature is a world we must relearn to honor and preserve while recognizing the limits of our control.

*Wind River, Nebraska Territory, Albert Bierstadt, 1861*

Tech is a double-edged sword, a basket teasing us with compelling tools. Technology shortens distances and accelerates time. It helps connect people in unexpected ways, enabling collaborations across great distances and preserving goods.

In the 19th century, technology for the Victorians symbolized the future and progress. Before the industrial era, things stayed where they belonged – mostly in the present. Everything had a defined order. Seasons dictated human and livestock activities. While merchants, soldiers, and explorers traveled, the majority of people led sedentary lifestyles within one territory.

With the advent of technology, the future became a concept. Utopia, dystopia, and science fiction found their place in the future. New ideas of social structures emerged, as seen in News from Nowhere by William Morris (1890). Steam and electricity fueled future speculations, expanding the limits of time and distance. Untapped geographies – and soon even new planets – became fantastic dreamlands. Steam engines and their black smoke ignited fantasies of elsewhere. Street vendors roasted goods. The sky became busy with balloons and dirigibles.

Heating, lighting, navigating, and flying were technologies designed to expand the natural world through human intelligence and acceleration. Days became longer with electricity.

Communication tools sped up human interaction. Yet technology can sometimes become a vessel for unchecked ambition, where speed, greed, monopoly, and an insatiable appetite for exponential growth risk reversing its benefits.

*Satirical Illustration: March of Intellect, “Grand vacuum tube company: direct to Bengal” by William Heath, 1829*

Innovation is the joker – a human reactor.
It reflects humanity's capacity to imagine, create, transform, and swiftly change direction each time needed. Innovation responds to danger and stagnation with intelligence, creativity, and willpower. Innovation carries the essence of everything new and renewed – often seen as a universal panacea. Science, sports, transportation, architecture, and the arts are just a few fields where stagnation is seen as a dead end with the tacit obligation to reinvent oneself. Inventions like the printing press (1439), the compound microscope (1620), the telephone (1876), and the lightbulb (1879) mark milestones, while innovations improve, implement, or redesign systems.

Together, these three "magnetic fields" spark a new way of thinking about the relationship between nature and humankind. Endangered by unchecked technology and manufacturing, this relationship calls for a complete reset, with technology working in sync with greater respect for the limits of the natural environment.

In the realm of sovereign nature and human intelligence, words act as conductors. On still water, they ripple and ricochet. Words seed, nurture, and express ideas, sentiments, aspirations, and complexity. They forge connections, inspire collaboration, and foster understanding. Just as atoms and particles are indivisible yet transformative, these chosen 25 #keywords and #concepts in #bioelectronics and beyond aim to tailor a sustainable future for all generations.

Sustainable Materials

1. Cellulose-Based Alternatives

Natural polymers replacing plastics and electronics in smart devices and packaging, such as chipless RFID tags for comprehensive product identification throughout the supply chain.

2. Bioplastics

Plastics derived from renewable biomass sources, such as corn or sugarcane. Bio-based materials like starch, polylactic acid (PLA), and polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) are now used to produce disposable medical supplies, including syringes, needles, and surgical trays.

3. Nanocellulose

A material made from natural fibers of nanometric size, used in electronics and packaging. A great alternative to plastic, nanocellulose comes in various forms like nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC), amorphous nanocellulose (NCA), and nanofibril cellulose (NFC). Its morphology and physical properties make it a promising material for applications such as filters, high-barrier packaging, electronic devices, food, medicine, cosmetics, and healthcare.

Learn more: TED Speaker Finish Bio Nanotechnologist Vegar Ottesen defines nanocellulose as a great and oxygen-proof replacement to plastic in food packaging.

4. Recycled Polymers

Plastics repurposed for new applications without using virgin materials. Recycling faces challenges like polymer degradation caused by contaminants in the recycling stream, but advancing technologies continue to address these issues.

Smart Technologies

5. Energy Harvesting Sensors

Self-powered sensors for smart cities and green buildings that capture and convert ambient energy into electricity. These sensors harness energy from sources such as sunlight, thermal energy, or mechanical vibrations, reducing dependence on traditional power sources like batteries. They can power themselves and sometimes store excess energy for future use.

6. Flexible Electronics

In the family of conducive ink products or flexible electronics, PaperWeight AI by AlmaScience is a case in point. It uses paper sensor technology to revolutionize traditional retail operations by providing real-time data analysis for improved inventory management, waste reduction, theft detection, and operational efficiency.

7. Biodegradable sensors

AlmaScience’s PetriTag® is an innovative, sustainable, paper-based, and cost-effective bacterial detector designed to transform the fish transport system and the fresh food industry as a whole.

Materials and Components

8. Conductive Ink

Electrically conductive ink used in printed electronics, typically made from materials like silver, carbon, or graphene. Commonly utilized in printed RFID solutions, such as chipless RFID tags. PaperWeight AI also makes use of this technology.

9. Bio-based Polymers

Plastics derived from renewable sources like corn or sugarcane, offering alternatives to petroleum-based plastics. Historically limited to packaging, textiles, and construction, these polymers are now gaining broader applications in sustainable manufacturing.

10. Cellulose Nanofibers

Lightweight, biodegradable materials used in electronics as substrates or components of flexible circuits, offering eco-friendly solutions for advanced electronic applications.

11. Tin-free Solder

Lead-free alternatives to traditional tin-lead solder, often made with bismuth or other less harmful metals. These solders reduce health risks associated with lead exposure, especially during soldering processes.

12. Eco-friendly Adhesives

Biodegradable or recyclable adhesives used to bond components in green electronics. Made from natural, renewable sources like starch or dextrin, these adhesives provide sustainable options for paper and packaging manufacturers.

Processes

13. E-waste Recycling

Techniques for recovering valuable materials like gold, silver, and rare earth metals from discarded electronics, addressing the alarming rise in electronic waste. In 2022, 62 million tons of e-waste were generated (an 82% increase since 2010), and this figure is projected to reach 82 million tons by 2030 (Source: Global e-Waste Monitor 2024).

14. Low-energy Manufacturing

Production processes aimed at minimizing energy consumption, often leveraging 3D printing (additive manufacturing). Initially limited to prototype creation in the 1980s, 3D printing has evolved into a viable industrial production technology, enabling the creation of complex geometries, hollow parts, and internal truss structures. This approach reduces material waste while maintaining precision and repeatability.

Policy & Governance

15. Life Cycle Assessment

Evaluate the environmental impact of a product, process, or service across its entire life cycle, from raw materials to disposal. It can compare products from different materials and sources, supporting the circular economy by identifying ways to reduce waste, improve resource efficiency, and promote reuse or recycling, enabling a shift to more sustainable systems.

16. Microplastics

In September 2023, the EU Commission adopted significant measures under the EU chemical legislation REACH to restrict microplastics intentionally added to products. These new rules are expected to prevent the release of about half a million tons of microplastics into the environment.

17. Carbon Footprint

A sustainability metric that measures the total greenhouse gas emissions caused by an entity or activity. Governments often implement carbon pricing (or CO₂ pricing) as a climate change mitigation strategy, assigning a monetary cost to greenhouse gas emissions. And that includes Carbon Pawprint.

18. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)

A policy approach that holds producers accountable for the waste generated by their products, encouraging sustainable product design and waste management practices.

19. Nature Governance

A philosophy that integrates nature consciousness into human systems of governance. It emphasizes eco-logical choices, eco-conscious decision-making, and an eco-responsible culture of stewardship and accountability to promote planetary health and the common good.

Technologies | Devices | Applications

20. Flexible Electronics

Bendable or foldable devices that use sustainable substrates, such as paper or bioplastics.

21. Energy Harvesting Systems

Technologies that capture energy from ambient sources like light, heat, or vibrations, reducing reliance on batteries. As an example, solar panels and other photovoltaic technology have advanced to the point where it is now possible to convert sunlight into useful electricity with efficiency.

22. Biodegradable Sensors

Eco-friendly sensors that decompose naturally, used in agriculture, healthcare, and environmental monitoring.

Read more about how AlmaScience contributes to solving the plastic crisis in Plastic Free July: our planet is not single-use

23. Eco-batteries

Batteries that use sustainable materials like sodium-ion or solid-state electrolytes, designed for reduced environmental impact. A new law to ensure that batteries are collected, reused, and recycled in Europe has entered into force in July 2023.

Circular Economy

24. Regenerative Design

Designing systems that mimic natural ecosystems, turning less usable forms of energy into more usable forms, creating resilient and equitable systems for society and nature.

25. Urban Mining

Extracting valuable materials from electronic waste, reducing the need for virgin resources while promoting sustainability in the electronics industry.

AlmaScience is a collaborative innovation R&D lab and a technology incubator for sustainable functional materials and green electronics.

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