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Tackling the complexity of e-waste for its reuse in functional materials

Nature Reviews Methods Primers volume 5, Article number: 46 (2025) Cite this article

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Discarded electronic waste is an environmental burden but holds promise as a sustainable source for manufacturing functional materials such as adsorbents, catalysts and electrodes. Addressing the challenges in re-using electronic waste-derived materials will require using the multi-component waste stream, predictive impurity control and standardized methods of cost assessment.

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Fig. 1: Strategies for managing impurities and maximizing material reproducibility in e-waste-derived functional materials.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22208082) and Hebei Agricultural University (YJ2021053).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Farmland Ecological Environment of Hebei Province, College of Resources and Environmental Science, Hebei Agricultural University, Baoding, China

    Bo Niu

  2. Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Huaqiao University, Xiamen, China

    Jiefeng Xiao

  3. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Zhenming Xu

  4. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China

    Jujun Ruan

Authors
  1. Bo Niu
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  2. Jiefeng Xiao
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  3. Zhenming Xu
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  4. Jujun Ruan
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All authors contributed substantially to discussion of the content.

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Correspondence to Bo Niu.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Niu, B., Xiao, J., Xu, Z. et al. Tackling the complexity of e-waste for its reuse in functional materials. Nat Rev Methods Primers 5, 46 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43586-025-00423-w

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