Glasgow's quiet revolution in sustainable electronics stepped into the Westminster spotlight last week, when Martin Rhodes MP toured the city's REACT Centre to see how local researchers are turning discarded gadgets into gold — quite literally.
The University of Glasgow-led centre, whose name stands for Responsible Electronics and Circular Technologies, laid on a programme of demonstrations for the visiting parliamentarian, from low-waste circuit-board manufacturing to a high-throughput recycling rig designed to recover gold, gallium and other critical materials from old devices.
For a city with a long industrial memory, it was a notably modern sort of show-and-tell.
What is "sustainable electronics", anyway?
The phrase is doing a lot of work. In plain terms, it covers two things: designing electronic products so they can be reused, repaired or recycled at the end of their lives; and building the kit and processes to claw back the valuable metals locked inside the mountains of so-called "e-waste" the rest of us throw away each year.
That matters because modern electronics rely on a thin global supply of rare and critical materials. Recovering them domestically — rather than mining them afresh on the other side of the world — promises a cleaner, more secure supply chain, and a tidy commercial opportunity besides.
REACT researchers also showed off battery-free environmental sensors, the kind of low-power devices that could one day monitor everything from soil moisture on a farm to air quality on a Glasgow street without contributing a single dead cell to landfill.
£6m of public money, and a national remit
Established in 2024 with more than £6 million of UK Government funding through UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), REACT is a cross-university effort. The University of Glasgow leads, with partners at the University of Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt University and the Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult.
Professor Jeff Kettle, REACT's principal investigator, was unambiguous about the city's place in the pecking order.
"Today's visit demonstrates that Glasgow is at the cutting edge of clean-tech manufacturing," he said. "With UKRI investment, our team is building the UK's capability in sustainable electronics, designing devices for reuse and recycling and recovering precious metals domestically. This is creating local green jobs and making our technology supply chains stronger and cleaner."
That green-jobs angle is no small thing. According to figures shared by REACT, Scotland's electronics cluster numbers more than 130 companies, employs around 10,300 people and turns over in excess of £2.8 billion a year. Anything that shores up that ecosystem — and adds skilled posts in recycling, recovery and circular design — is welcome news for the local economy.
"Local economic value and wider national importance"
The MP, for his part, sounded suitably impressed.
"It was a pleasure to visit the University of Glasgow and see first-hand the work being carried out through the REACT programme," Mr Rhodes said. "It is encouraging to see UK Government investment supporting innovation in Glasgow that has both local economic value and wider national importance."
He added that the work had "clear relevance" to the parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee's interests in resource use, waste reduction and supply chain resilience — a polite way of signalling that what is being cooked up in a Glasgow lab may yet inform policy in SW1.
Dr Mahmoud Wagih, a reader at the University of Glasgow and REACT co-director, framed it more practically. "Our focus is on developing practical solutions for sustainable electronics, from design through to end-of-life recovery," he said. The team, he added, is "leveraging the UKRI funding to build a capability here in Glasgow that strengthens UK electronic supply chains, reduces environmental impact and supports high-value research and industry collaboration."
A centre quietly extracting gold from old phones while writing the playbook for greener gadgets to come? Glasgow, it seems, has form on this.
