Sustainability in action at Oracle

Cracked phone screens could become a thing of the past thanks to breakthrough research conducted at The University of Queensland. The global team of researchers, led by UQ’s Dr Jingwei Hou, Professor Lianzhou Wang and Professor Vicki Chen, have unlocked the technology to produce next-generation composite glass for lighting LEDs and smartphone, television and computer screens (Science, “Liquid-phase sintering of lead halide perovskites and metal-organic framework glasses”).

From 2013 to 2016, Oxfam’s Behind the Brands campaign called on the world’s 10 biggest food and beverage companies to adopt stronger social and environmental sourcing policies and spurred significant commitments on women’s empowerment, land rights and climate change.

Engineers at ANU have invented a semiconductor with organic and inorganic materials that can convert electricity into light very efficiently, and it is thin and flexible enough to help make devices such as mobile phones bendable (Advanced Materials, “Efficient and Layer-Dependent Exciton Pumping across Atomically Thin Organic–Inorganic Type-I Heterostructures”).  The invention also opens the door to a new generation of high-performance electronic devices made with organic materials that will be biodegradable or that can be easily recycled, promising to help substantially reduce e-waste.