Environmental issues

Samsung Display announced that its latest AMOLED laptop displays achieved UL's GREENGUARD Gold Certification for low chemical emissions. This is the first laptop display to achieve this certification (UL 2819).

This certification is awarded to products such as electronic and medical equipment that meet its volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and particle emission standards. With LCDs, the backlighting unit can be a major VOC origin due to its use of multiple plastic substrate sheets. According to UL, Samsung's OLED panels reduced the emission of VOCs to about half of LCD's emission.

LG Display says that OLED TV production is more environmentally friendly than LCD TV production. A 65-inch LCD requires around 5.2 Kg of plastic, while a similarly-sized OLED uses only 0.43 Kg of plastics.

LG Display says that in Q1 2021 alone its plastic consumption was lower by 71,550 tons compared to what it would have been if it produced LCD TVs instead of OLED TVs.

LG Display announced that its OLED TV panels have received Eco-Product certification from Swiss-based SGS (Société Générale de Surveillance). LG's OLED TV panels have been recognized as eco-friendly products with low emissions of hazardous substances.

SGS evaluated the overall environmental aspects of OLED TV panels and found their environmental friendliness to be especially notable in three categories covering the lowering of indoor air pollutants, the reduction of hazardous substances, and high recyclability.

Excessive exposure to blue light has been linked to many health issues (including cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity and insomnia). Researchers from Taiwan's National Tsing-Hua University, led by Prof. J.H. Jou, have been advocates of candle-light OLED lighting for a long time, as part of their fight against the hazards of LEDs and white light. We recently posted on Prof. Jou's latest research on smartphone display risks and the benefits of OLED displays.

In 2015, Taiwan's PMOLED maker WiseChip Semiconductors licensed National Tsing-Hua University's blue-light free OLED lighting technology (called Candlelight OLEDs), with an aim to mass produce these OLEDs by the end of 2017. That project faced delays, however and now NTHU announced that following a collaboration with China's OLED lighting maker First-o-lite it is now ready to commercialize its technology and NTHU demonstrated the first device to use these new panels - the OLED lighting desk-lamp you can see in the video above (and photo below).

Excessive exposure to blue light has been linked to many health issues - including cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity and insomnia. Children, especially, have delicate retinas that are highly susceptible to the dangers of blue light.

Researchers from Taiwan's National Tsing-Hua University, led by Prof. J.H. Jou, have been advocates of candle-light OLED lighting for a long time, as part of their fight against the hazards of LEDs and white light. In 2015, the researchers published a call out to consumers to be aware of the hazards of LEDs and to governments to enact new rules to enforce light-based products to show the light spectrum.

The Fraunhofer Institute is working on alternative light sources for photo therapy, and Flexible OLED technology is prime candidate because it is light weight, can be flexed and does not produce almost any heat (unlike LED-based lighting).

Before flexible OLEDs are actually used in such treatment, though, it is important to know if OLEDs carry any potential toxic risks. The Fraunhofer FEP performed an initial study on in vitro cell cultures afflicted by defined damage. The researchers used flexible 10x10 cm green OLEDs, and found that the OLEDs positively stimulated the damaged cells, as expected. The tests showed now cytotoxity in the material systems, including when the OLEDs were bent (this increases the chance of material leakage from the OLEDs).

Taiwan's National Tsing-Hua University is continuing its fight against the hazards of LEDs and white light - a research team from NTHU published a call to the public to think carefully about television, computer, phone, tablet and other LED-based display usage as the white light produced by LEDs can be hazardous.

The researchers say that people should consider new candle-light style lighting sources for reading, residence and street light. They also urge governments and legislators to enact new rules that will force light-based products to show the light spectrum emitted by the product.

Earlier this month, we reported that Taiwan's WiseChip is entering the OLED lighting market with plans to produce candle-light emitting OLEDs using technology developed at Taiwan's National Tsing-Hua University.

Wisechip already started to produce sample panels, and the first ones were setup in an aboriginal village as street lights - embedded inside a bee-hive like mask taken from rotten wood. This tribe, Tai-Yah (also called Atayal), has been without electricty until 1979 (they were known as the "dark tribe"), and currently the use CFL street lights, but rejected a suggestion by the government to install LED lights.

An LG Display researcher revealed that the company is developing a roll-to-roll process to produce flexible OLED displays. LG says this will enable them to make very flexible displays and reduce production costs.

LG Display also seeks to replace the aluminum electrodes with copper ones. This will again decrease costs and will also enable higher-resolution displays. There are some concerns with copper electrodes over environmental hazards but LGD apparently resolved those issues.

A team of researchers from North Carolina State University have launched a new crowd funding project at Experiment.com, trying to raise a small amount of money ($400 to $800) to begin a new research that potentially may have implications for OLED applications, as they may enable simple and environmentally friendly OLED emitters.

The researchers developed a new method to form carbon-carbon bonds, which include the formation of spirocyclic carbon centers. Those kinds of molecules have been shown by others to be potentially useful as OLED materials but are difficult to synthesize in bulk, and this research hopes to solve this issue.