Yesterday's TV could become tomorrow's skin tissue

A material now tossed away with every old television set could be recycled and used to help doctors regenerate human tissue and administer medications, according to new research from the University of York.

Used widely in industry, the chemical compound polyvinyl-alcohol (PVA) is a key element of television sets with liquid crystal display (LCD) technology. When such old sets are thrown away, the LCD panels are usually incinerated or buried in landfill sites.

Instead of letting PVA go to waste, scientists at the university say, we would do better to recover the material. Properly treated, it could be used in tissue scaffolds designed to help parts of the body regenerate. It could also be used in pills or in dressings designed to deliver drugs to specific parts of the body.

“With 2.5 billion liquid crystal displays already reaching the end of their life, and LCD televisions proving hugely popular with consumers, that is a huge amount of potential waste to manage,” said James Clark, director of the York Green Chemistry Centre of Excellence and one of the authors of the research. “It is important that we find ways of recycling as many elements of LCDs as possible so we don’t simply have to resort to burying and burning them.”

The researchers have developed a technique where recovered material is heated in water in a microwave and washed in ethanol to produced “expanded PVA.” One of this material’s key properties is that it does not provoke a response from the human immune system, making it suitable for use in biomedicine.