From self-healing phone screens to concrete that repairs itself, businesses are investing in futuristic materials. But can it curb our throwaway habits?

Welcome to the future, where your phone can fix its own smashed screen

Welcome to the future, where your phone can fix its own smashed screen

Smashed screens, broken circuits, water damaged keyboards – we send millions of tonnes of broken electronics to the dump every year. But what if our phones and laptops could fix themselves?

This month, it emerged that smartphone company Motorola had filed a patent for a self-healing phone display. The design includes a “shape memory polymer”, which the patent application says would at least partly reverse damage when exposed to heat. In theory, at least, users could hit a “repair” button and wait for their cracked screens to mend.

Other tech giants are at it too. Samsung, for example, has been sponsoring research into self-healing materials, including a Stanford project to design a polymer that can repair itself if punctured.

As futuristic as they sound, self-healing materials are not a new idea. Researchers have been working on concrete that can repair its own cracks for years, and have developed a variety of techniques, such as embedding tiny capsules containing healing agents in the concrete, which would be triggered when cracks appear.

As the range of possible applications for self-healing materials has expanded, so too has interest from industry and academia, with proponents excited by a development they believe could save money while helping to curb our throwaway habits.

Researcher Cai Liheng is part of a team at Harvard University that has just patented a new kind of self-healing rubber. Rather than cracking when excess force is applied, the material, which incorporates reversible polymer bonds, will return to its original form when the stress is released, he says.

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The breakthrough could eventually lead to tyres that last forever, says Cai, but the material has a wide range of other potential uses too. Rubber is also used for medical implants and in automotive supplies, among other applications. “Think about it – anywhere we use rubber, it could still have the mechanical properties of old rubber but can also self-heal. That would result in huge environmental benefits.”

The sentiment is echoed by Bob Lark, professor of engineering at Cardiff University and head of a UK research group devoted to advancing self-healing concrete. For the growing numbers of construction companies and clients interested in the product, environmental concerns are a key factor, he says: “They are driven by a recognition that we need to be ever vigilant in relation to both sustainability and economic issues, and that … we can’t just carry on using materials in the way that we have done in the past.”

Interest is not the same as investment, however. And convincing the public bodies that commission most civil engineering projects to shell out on a more expensive and experimental material now so as to save resources in 50 years time is a challenge, says Lark. “Commercially it’s still a real conundrum – we haven’t cracked it yet,” he says.

There are conundrums for other sectors too: what role for tyre manufacturers in a world where no one ever needs new tyres, for example? And how do smartphone companies benefit from self-healing phones when their profits depend on high turnover of devices?

For Adam Lusby, lecturer in circular economy implementation at the University of Exeter, such questions highlight the need for companies to move away from conventional business models that encourage “premature obsolescence and waste creation”.

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He advocates a move towards businesses offering products as a service, rather than something for individuals to own (and later throw away), an approach that’s already making inroads in sectors from lighting to children’s bikes. Under this model, self-healing materials would actually help business by reducing their costs, he says.

In the smartphone sector specifically, Gary Cook, senior IT analyst for Greenpeace, agrees a shake-up is needed. “A huge amount of Earth’s resources go into these devices,” he says. “Having the company stock price or business model dependent on getting customers to buy an entirely new handset every two years is simply not sustainable.”

But he says there is plenty that companies can be doing now to promote longer-lasting products, without waiting for new materials to come along. Designing phones that are easy to repair would be a first step, he says, pointing out that even most smartphone batteries are now impossible to replace without specialist tools.

And while self-healing electronics sound great, they could also bring environmental trade-offs, says Cook, pointing to unanswered questions about how resource intensive they would be, or how hard to recycle. “We don’t yet know enough to assess it and say if it’s a good or bad thing,” he says.

Those trade-offs are also a concern for environmental charity Green Alliance, which has worked to raise awareness of the possible pitfalls of new materials billed as sustainable breakthroughs.

“Despite the potential to support more efficient use of resources, some characteristics of these novel developments could also undermine sustainability by increasing material complexity and making it harder to recover them through established value recovery systems,” says senior policy adviser Libby Peake.

The answer, she says, is for designers and policymakers to make sure solutions for the end of a product’s life – even if that life is a long one – are factored in from the outset.