Methods for extracting components and materials from waste liquid crystal displays have been developed. The methods enable the components to be extracted with their key properties preserved, thus qualifying them for re‐use both in LCD and other applications. Novel applications for re‐use of recycled LCD components have been developed in which the LCD components contribute with a substantial customer benefit.

Using only high-level design and verification tools a group of 25 students designed a complete system ranging from an optimizing Pascal compiler and a real-time kernel to a high performance, pipelined datapath and the layout of an entire microprocessor. The project also included a detailed verification of the entire system consisting of cooperating hardware and software. After fabrication the system not only worked as specified, but was also sucessfully used in a demanding real-time application. By providing a united design environment for hardware and software, system level tradeoffs can be part of the design process. The project reported here gave the students a unique insight into how the different parts of a computer system interact.

LCD is the dominant electronic display technology today. The use of LCDs in consumer products such as PC monitors and TVs means that by 2020 as much as 25 million square metres of LCD panels may be entering the waste stream every year. Methods to recover parts of a LCD, e.g. plastic case and electronics, exists today but very little has been done regarding recovering the valuable materials in the LCD panel. We have shown that many of the materials in a LCD can be recovered at a high quality level so that they can be reused in new products instead of being burnt or used as land-fill. A production line has been developed that can recover the materials in an industrial scale. The production requires low energy and has a high throughput within a very small footprint making it suitable for both small and large scale production.