Leaves are pretty amazing things. Any plant that grows them appreciates their usefulness in their own way, of course. But dead leaves serve many purposes, too, including providing shelter over winter for insects that will work hard the next year as pollinators and predators to pests. But I didn’t realize that leaves just might be the next great thing in reducing e-waste.

This black and white photo of winter foliage I shot in Fernie, B.C. highlights the distinct veining in each leaf.

Electronic waste is, unsurprisingly, a huge problem these days. Not only is most everything from your cellphone to your laptop and earbuds made of plastic or fibreglass and a good dollop of epoxy, the electronics industry has us on a dastardly cycle of forever replacing perfectly good stuff because suddenly they’re out of date and/or can no longer sync up with other stuff you have and/or don’t have the latest/greatest apps and/or the newest version of fill-in-the-blank is just too cool to resist. I call these kind of toss-and-replace designs ‘Planned Obsolescence’.

It’s hard not to get caught up in this vicious cycle. At some point, you do need to have at least some of your devices compatible so upgrading is practically unavoidable. But what if the material that those devices were made of were a little kinder to the environment?

The fantastically envisioned future of Leaftronics

So Rakesh Nair, at the Institute for Applied Physics at the Dresden University of Technology, came up with the idea of replacing printed circuit boards (PCBs – the boards that electronic components are attached to) with tree leaves. Taking advantage of a tree leaf’s exceptionally strong network of veins (as seen in the photo above), Nair developed biodegradable ‘boards’ that could be laser-cut, printed and soldered. Hello, leaftronics.

You can read the whole fascinating story, published on the Science.org website, here.

So, that’s the good news. The not-so-great news is that [a]s with any budding technology, the biggest challenge will likely be convincing electronics manufacturers to adopt leaftronics. Although the materials performed well in laboratory tests, that may not be enough to induce manufacturers to switch to them. As sturdy as leaftronic boards are, they aren’t quite as robust as current electronic components.

 “Maybe [regulators] have to lower the barrier [on stability] by 5% to allow us to get into this market,” says Hans Kleemann, an experimental physicist at TU Dresden and Nair’s adviser. “It’s more about the willingness of the industry to change, because they need to compromise.”

So this is where we come in

As gardeners, nature lovers and people who just want to save the world a bit, we might be able to help out and now is the perfect time. Everywhere you turn, you’re probably being inundated with Black Friday bargains, Cyber Monday discounts and Super Saving offers every other day of the week. So, what if we all added a little soft activism to our shopping sprees?

Next time you go hunting for something electronic, why not ask the sales person or Chatbot whether any of the parts in the item are biodegradable. And then maybe say, “What? No leaftronics? Oh, that is a shame!”

You never know. Consumer demand is a powerful thing.