Transforming electronic plastics into bioadaptive 3D porous construct for advanced cell culture applications

Electronic plastics (e-plastics) are indispensable in modern society, but their low recycling rate and environ-mental persistence have raised significant concerns. Prevailing plastic recycling strategies are inadequate to fully capture the economic benefits inherent to e-plastics, providing limited incentives for recycling. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop innovative approaches aimed at maximizing the capture of value from e-plastics. Herein, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) from discarded keyboards was unconventionally "re-tooled" to produce highly porous bioadaptive 3D sponge-like constructs for advanced in vitro applications. The ABSponge was surface functionalized via layer-by-layer (LBL) electrostatic deposition method to generate 3D human breast, colorectal and bone cancer spheroids as a drug screening tool or adapted for co-culturing of cancer spheroids and cancer-associated-fibroblasts to emulate the complex tumor niche. Collectively, our findings reveal the promising potential of using discarded keyboards as a "waste-to-resource" feedstock for advanced in-vitro biotechnological applications, achieving waste reduction and maximizing value-capture.