PCB Recycling Patents: Leaders, Trends & White Space 2026
Printed Circuit Board Recycling Patents: Who Leads and Where the Gaps Sit
41.4% concentration. The top 5 of 42 ranked assignees hold 29 of the 70 records in scope — a leader group, then a long tail. Filings rose to a peak of 9 in 2021, then declined to 5 by 2024 — a 44% drop across that three-year span. The most recent years in the chart are structurally incomplete because of publication lag, so read the 2025-26 tail as a floor, not a ceiling.
- 1GEM CO LTD7
- 2KOREA INSTITUTE OF GEOSCIENCE AND MINERAL RESOURCES6
- 3GREENOVEL INC6
- 4UNIV AVEIRO5
- 5BEIJING UNIV OF TECH5
See the full printed circuit board recycling analysis in Eureka
- The complete ranking, not just the top five
- Every IPC branch with its share of the corpus
- The most-cited records, and where claim space is still thin
Common questions about this landscape
Who holds the most patents in printed circuit board recycling?
Across the 42 ranked assignees in this dataset, the leading filer holds 7 of the 70 records in scope, with the fifth-placed assignee at 5 and the tenth at 3. That is a gradual taper rather than one company dominating the field, and the top 5 combined account for 41.4% of all records. Readers should treat this as a snapshot of published families, not a measure of commercial market share.
Is patent filing in this field growing or shrinking?
Filing activity peaked at 9 records in 2021 and had declined to 5 by 2024, a 44% drop over that three-year span. Because patent publication typically lags filing by about 18 months, 2025 and 2026 counts are still incomplete and will rise as more applications publish. The honest read is a real cooling through 2021-2024, not a field that has stopped moving.
What technical approaches dominate PCB recycling patents?
Solid waste disposal processes (IPC class B09B) appear in 48.6% of the 70 records, and metal extraction and refining (C22B) in 40.0%, making these the two largest claim areas. Electrostatic and magnetic separation (B03C) and printed circuit assembly (H05K) each cover 25.7% of records. This distribution shows that most patent activity targets what happens to a board after it is shredded — separating and recovering materials — rather than how the board is designed.
Disclaimer. This analysis is based on Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent records and is provided for general information and reference only. Patent data carries inherent limitations — recent filings are under-counted because of publication lag, counts may be on a record or family basis, classification and applicant-name data may contain errors or duplicates, and the underlying search query defines the scope shown — so the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing here is an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Verify independently and review with qualified patent and legal professionals before acting on it.
Method: Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on Printed Circuit Board Recycling covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish. Every share divides by all records in scope. Data: Patsnap Eureka. See the full landscape report.