Many different environmental impacts arise from electronics, and the handling of electronic waste (e-waste) is rising quickly to the top of the agenda. E-waste is a significant issue for Europe: Improving its management is an explicit goal of the Green Deal objectives and the Circular Economy Action Plan (3.1. Electronics and ICT). However, due to the requirement to involve the whole value chain, from raw material suppliers to consumers, the complex material background and supply chain, as well as the multitude of competing interests, achieving circularity in the electronics industry is challenging. The main aim of the EECONE project is to reduce e-waste on a European scale. To this end, 54 entities (47 partners, 2 associated partners and 5 affiliated entities) from 16 European countries covering different sectors of activity have joined forces to propose practical ways of reducing the volume of e-waste in the EU. Crucially, the entities that make up EECONE represent all parts of the value chain. EECONE’s approach is interdisciplinary, covering the social, economic, technological, and policy aspects. The environmental impact arising from e-waste can thus be reduced by working in three principal areas: a) Increase service lifetime of electronic products by application of ecodesign guidelines for increasing their reliability and their repair rate, thereby reducing the volume of e-waste. Reduction and replacement of materials to decrease the impact of e-waste. b) Improved circularity by reusing, recycling, and waste valorising materials/elements from electronic products. EECONE’s vision is to develop and embed the constraints linked to managing the end-of-life of electronic products from the very beginning – in the development or process design. EECONE is paving the way as a first step toward a zero-waste electronic industry. The “6R concept will fully guide EECONE” (Reduce, Reliability, Repair, Reuse, Refurbish, Recycle). To deploy its ambitious vision, the EECONE project defines four main objectives: a) Define green. Create clear, simple, open tools to define and design ECS for circularity. Generate, for the first time, a clear framework aiding producers to evaluate their choices and pathways to ecodesign, to foster European leadership in the green transition. b) Make green ECS (Electronic Components Systems): Provide innovative techniques for reducing, repairing, reusing, refurbishing, recycling to decrease e-waste and boost circularity in a new generation of electronics. c) Showcase green solutions: Demonstrate innovation potential, usability, and versatility of the green solution along the value chain. d) Building consciousness: Create an ecosystem empowering the 6R ECS generation. EECONE is a major opportunity to create a European ECOsystem for greeN Electronics and to position Europe as a role model for low environmental impact electronics.

Currently, most Internet of Things (IoT) devices and low power consumer electronics devices are powered by primary non-rechargeable batteries, which require periodic replacement and maintenance owing to their relatively short lifespans as power sources. Considering the advancement of IoT ecosystems for smart homes, offices, factories and retail (by 2027, an estimated 30 billion IoT devices will be in use), powering a huge number of IoT devices solely from primary batteries would not be practically sustainable from an environmental, resource, safety and cost perspective. Energy harvesting technology has the potential to overcome these issues through providing self-sufficient, autonomous, low-power for IoT electronics by harvesting available unused energy. A promising energy harvesting technology is through light energy harvesting (LEH) of ambient indoor light using photovoltaic technology which is capable of generating power even under indoor low-light conditions. Within this class of photovoltaic devices are organic photovoltaics (OPV), which, unlike inorganic silicon, have various inherent advantages such as lightweight, flexibility, solution processability and cost-effective large area manufacturing capabilities. Moreover, OPVs can convert weak indoor light into electricity more efficiently than other PV technologies due to their spectral tunability and higher optical absorptivity as well as low leakage currents which are desirable for efficient operation of PV cells as they minimise power losses and improve the fill factor, especially at low-light intensities. The main focus of the ENLIGHTENED project is to increase the potential of PV technology for low-power, low-light applications by demonstrating the viability and potential of OPV-based LEH technology, to meet the power and energy requirements of a diverse range of customers representing Retail, Property Tech and Consumer Electronics.