Recent advance in renewable materials and green processes for optoelectronic applications

With the growing global environmental awareness, the development of renewable and green materials has gained increased worldwide interest. Being at the heart of current scientific research studies, renewable polymers, include natural, semisynthetic, and microbial polymers, have a scope in vast diverse applications in packaging, agriculture, medicine, and optoelectronic technological fields. In recent years, research interest has been increasingly focused on integrating biodegradable polymers into optoelectronic devices for the sake of reducing non-degradable waste and conserving our environment. Numerous biobased materials have been successfully incorporated in organic field-effect transistor memory, resistor memory, and organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices. Besides natural biomaterials, there are also various biobased synthetic polymers used in electronic devices; for example, sugar-based block copolymers have been synthesized to fabricate stretchable memory devices. Several recent studies have also been devoted to integrating green materials into OPV devices in hope of fulfilling sustainable development. In this mini-review, science development of exploiting renewable materials, introducing environmentally friendly processing solvents, and their corresponding applications toward an environmental sustainable life will be briefly narrated.