Nordic Semiconductor uses recycled plastic to make component reels

        Nordic Semiconductor, a leading manufacturer of low-power wireless IoT connectivity solutions, announced that it has become one of the first semiconductor companies to make component reels from recycled plastic, taking an important step in its sustainability strategy and reducing nearly 15,000 kilograms of waste plastic each year.

        “We are always looking for ways to minimize our impact on the environment. We are therefore very pleased to have achieved this milestone with our trusted OSAT partner. This is particularly important given that Nordic’s customers are the world’s largest ‘consumers’ of semiconductor chips for wireless IoT connectivity, with hundreds of millions of devices with Nordic components deployed each year,” said Ole-Fredrik Morken, Executive Vice President Supply Chain at Nordic Semiconductor. He noted that as the Internet of Things (I0T) continues to grow, so will the consumption of these chips in applications such as smart homes, healthcare, asset tracking, professional lighting, building automation, smart agriculture, power metering, wireless audio and retail. Nordic Semiconductor is always looking for ways to minimize its impact on the environment.

        Nordic currently uses recycled plastic for most of its component packaging reels. Nordic needed to test the recycled plastic component reels to ensure that they performed as reliably as their traditional non-recycled counterparts and met all relevant component reel industry standards. This meant that the component packaging would not break during shipping, protecting Nordic’s valuable semiconductor components, and would not get stuck when fed into high-speed PCB placement machines.

        “While this is still a small contribution to sustainable development, it is significant,” said Geir Langeland, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Nordic Semiconductor. “If you consider the market potential for IoT applications, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, where Nordic is at the forefront, it is foreseeable that Nordic could soon be supplying billions of devices per year.”