High Performance Organic Solar Cells Fabricated Using Recycled Transparent Conductive Substrates

The power conversion efficiency (PCE) of organic solar cells (OSCs) has been gradually increasing over the past years, but these emerging photovoltaic devices still suffer from relatively short lifetimes. To promote circular economy and reduce costly electronic materials wastes, we explore the possibility of recycling durable zinc oxide coated indium tin oxide (ITO/ZnO) from nonfullerene OSCs through sequential ultrasonication in a series of solvents followed by thermal annealing. With the adequate cleaning sequence, the recycled ITO/ZnO substrates produce PCEs of 8.65%, a value comparable to the PCEs obtained with freshly prepared substrates (8.73%). Our results also indicate that isopropanol gradually removes the zinc oxide layer and should thus be avoided when attempting multiple successive recycling of the same substrate. ITO/ZnO substrates recycled 10 times with and without isopropanol yield PCEs of 5.14% and 7.93%, respectively. By optimizing the recycling procedure, we introduce a simple strategy to considerably increase the lifecycle of transparent electrode substrates employed in organic electronic devices and decrease the amount of wastes from the electronic industry.