E-trash Talk

Every year, Americans toss millions of phones, laptops, and wearable devices. Most end up in landfills, leaching toxic lead, mercury, and arsenic into the ground. The circuit boards inside those discarded gadgets contain gold, silver, and other precious metals—but conventional electronics are built in ways that make recovery nearly impossible.

EnduraCure, a startup born in the U’s Price College of Engineering, is changing that. The company makes flexible polymer substrates—think of them as the structural backbone of a circuit board—that perform like conventional materials during use but dissolve in a mild chemical bath at the end of their life. That makes it possible to recover the valuable metals inside rather than burying them.

“It’s all about making these products degradable by design,” says CEO Dennis Pruzan PhD’18, a U materials science grad. “We’re pushing toward a circular economy and reducing loads on landfills.”

The company grew out of the lab of Chen Wang, an assistant professor of materials science whose research focuses on sustainable polymers. Pruzan came back to the lab after years in industry—he helped develop carbon fiber products at DPS Skis—and eventually took the helm at EnduraCure.

The startup’s initial targets are medical sensors, smart packaging, and wearable devices, all of which demand both durability and flexibility. EnduraCure recently earned a National Science Foundation Phase 1 Small Business Technology Transfer award to fund continued research and commercialization, and the team is now seeking manufacturing partners to scale up.

“It’s very clear that Utah has a wealth of resources to make those connections,” Pruzan adds.