Recovering noble metals from Waste Electrical Electronic Equipment (WEEE) will provide an additional income within the disposal process of end-of-life electronic devices. Generally, the recycling process starts with the manual dismantling of different devices and with sorting of the subdivided products into useful and hazardous materials. A sample of about 21 tonnes of WEEE was dismantled in 14 days to remove Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) that were about 5% weight of the whole sample. Computer PCBs proved to contain the 96% of all the gold present in all types of PCBs of the sample. Computer PCBs were manually dismantled to obtain the easy-to-remove components of the board, namely, the integrated circuits and the processors, which were about 13% weight of the board and 0.1% weight of the whole WEEE sample and contained about 91% of the gold present in the whole board with an average concentration of 2400 μg/g
Optimization of Precious Metal Recovery from Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Boards / Delfini, Massimo; Ferrini, Mauro; Andrea, Manni; Massacci, Paolo; Piga, Luigi; Scoppettuolo, Antonio. - In: JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION. - ISSN 2152-2219. - ELETTRONICO. - 02:06(2011), pp. 675-682. [10.4236/jep.2011.26078]
Optimization of Precious Metal Recovery from Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Boards
DELFINI, Massimo;FERRINI, Mauro;MASSACCI, Paolo;PIGA, LUIGI;SCOPPETTUOLO, Antonio
2011
Abstract
Recovering noble metals from Waste Electrical Electronic Equipment (WEEE) will provide an additional income within the disposal process of end-of-life electronic devices. Generally, the recycling process starts with the manual dismantling of different devices and with sorting of the subdivided products into useful and hazardous materials. A sample of about 21 tonnes of WEEE was dismantled in 14 days to remove Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) that were about 5% weight of the whole sample. Computer PCBs proved to contain the 96% of all the gold present in all types of PCBs of the sample. Computer PCBs were manually dismantled to obtain the easy-to-remove components of the board, namely, the integrated circuits and the processors, which were about 13% weight of the board and 0.1% weight of the whole WEEE sample and contained about 91% of the gold present in the whole board with an average concentration of 2400 μg/gI documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.