Sustainable Recycling of Printed Circuit Boards

Abstract

The growing amount of unrecycled Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) is posing a dreadful danger to the environment and all the inhabitants of the planet. The problem of the WEEE pollution did not appear overnight yet rather has a long history of by-times irresponsible behavior of the producers and consumers. The constant development of technology associated with the ever-demanding customers’ behavior has unleashed tonnes of outdated and discarded goods into landfills yet depleted the natural deposits for the fossils that were required for the future generations of the Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EEE). To tackle the problem of pollution and depletion of the strategic resources for development, society started to work on the strategies ensuring future development needs and a safe environment to live in. The recycling of the WEEE today became a lighthouse to the sustainable future where the environmental pollution and scarcity of the resources would be decreased, as the transition towards the sustainable future must be swift and Meanwhile, the recycling itself can often be ground for the contradictions in the utilization of the materials, especially when it comes to choosing to target valuable materials and sacrifice materials of lower value, to obtain the profit from the recycling, while following the legislation that might force the recyclers to review their materials’ recovery agenda. Furthermore, the changing guidelines for recycling industries, that concern the recovery, utilization of materials, and emissions from processes can surpass the expectations force the industry to look for new more sustainable approaches. Amid the demanding branches of materials being in recycling (recyclates) – the Waste Printed Circuit Boards (WPCB) which are rich with valuable resources, are at the same time complex matter to process, due to twisted and bounded structure trapping valuable materials within non-valuable materials. Therefore, the treatment of such complex matters requires an accurate approach to recover the highest possible amount of the precious materials, while leaving the rest unharmed, hence avoiding the emissions. This task requires a solution that could give the user control over these rich, but meanwhile rather unsorted and ever-changing source of valuable resources. The study overviews the WEEE recycling framework state-of-the-art and brings in insights into the modern industry performance. At the same time, a potential solution to the WPCB recycling problem – unliberated valuable and invaluable materials was introduced. The disintegrator collision-based mill has proven itself effective with processing layered minerals to the fine and extra-fine sizes, while has also shown its potential in being deployed as the size-reduction solution for liberating valuable and invaluable materials of WPCBs before enrichment process(-es) that would provide enriched metal concentrate to the refining stage of the recycling. The project seeks to find the answer to sustainability in the WPCBs processing while reinforcing the pattern for the higher extent of the materials present in WPCBs structure. Achieving higher purity of the materials in the pre-treatment stage of the project, the enriched metal or non-metal concentrates would lower the emissions and increase the recovery rates for valuable materials from the WEEE.