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DissolvPCB enables fully recyclable 3D-printed circuit boards with liquid metal conductors
(3dprintingindustry.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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It's arguably easier, but I think it depends on your use case.
Etching usually requires a couple chemicals that not everyone has the space to store properly, like if they live in a small apartment and have kids, and even if you go with safer alternatives like vinegar over ferric chloride, after use the etching solution should still be considered poisonous and needs to be handled and disposed of with some care.
Also worth considering is that this method is solder-free, so in addition to not needing to solder anything, it's easier to recover components, no desoldering needed, just warm it up a bit and pull out the components for reuse.
Just thinking back to different points in my life, I used to live in a small apartment with my wife and a roommate. I wouldn't have wanted to keep acetone around there, anytime I used it it would have stunk up the whole place. And I didn't really want to do any soldering there, our ventilation wasn't great and our smoke detectors were on a hair trigger, and I lived in fear of losing my security deposit from dropping a stray blob of solder burning a hole in the carpet or something. PVA printing is pretty innocuous as far as fumes go, and I wouldn't have needed much equipment beyond an electric kettle (other than a printer) to play around with this there.
Really though, I see this being most useful for a situation where you want to prototype a few iterations that you'll want to field test. I wouldn't want to etch a dozen prototype boards that can't really be reused and have to desolder to recover all the components, but I could see printing out a dozen prototypes this way and refusing the liquid metal and such.
I'd probably still want my final board to be etched, but this gives you a good way to workshop a bunch of revisions without throwing out a bunch of etched boards.
Also I don't know how the cost of PVA filament stacks up against copper clad boards, but just kind of guestimating from my limited knowledge of 3d printing, it seems like the cost of boards vs filament is probably about the same or maybe even better. Sure, there's the startup costs of getting the metal and a printer, but I feel like a lot of the people who would want to do this probably already have a printer or were looking for an excuse to get one anyway, and the metal is reusable.
It looks good for prototyping true and makes the whole thing easy to disassemble and reuse. As for safety and size concerns I think they are pretty similar with 3d printers and etching. PVA is far more expensive, starting from us$40, while copper coated fiberglass panels cost <$1 per square meter. It really looks like a great process for learning institutions/kids I wouldlove ro try it it at least once. 🙃
It's around $40 for a spool, I'm not sure what that works out to per square meter of printed board, and I'm far too lazy to work that out.
It also seems to me like it could be a more efficient use of board space since it could be printed closer to the shape of the traces than you'd probably want to trim a board to by hand so you can save on material a bit that way. A bunch of cut corners and notches cut out of a few boards could add up over a few prints.
I'm just spitballing some thoughts, I don't do nearly enough circuit designing to have a horse in this race, nor the desire to really work out the economics of it but especially for someone who already owns a 3d printer and maybe is already using PVA filament this seems like something that could fit well into their existing workflows.