Electronic Waste

6Recycling Technologies – Physical Separation

Amit Kumar¹, Maria E. Holuszko¹, and Shulei Song²

¹University of British Columbia, NBK Institute of Mining Engineering, 6350 Stores Road, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z4, Canada

²China University of Mining and Technology, School of Chemical Engineering, Ding No.11 Xueyuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100083, People’s Republic of China

6.1 Introduction

Electronic waste has been a growing concern around the world. The amount of e-waste generated has been growing at a rate of 3–4% and is expected to reach 120 million tonnes by 2050. With the development of new technologies, especially in laptops, cellphones, and tablets, older technologies are getting obsolete, reducing the lifespan of electrical and electronics products and thus contributing to a higher rate of waste generation. These staggering facts should be considered as an essential incentive for e-waste recycling. If this waste is recycled correctly, it could offer an opportunity for urban mining for the recovery of copper, gold, silver, palladium, and other metals with an estimated value of 55 billion euros. The concentration of metals in e-waste is also significantly higher than the natural ores.

Various routes are currently being implemented to recover metals from the e-waste stream. The recycling methods for e-waste could be broadly categorized into two sections, preprocessing and end processing (Namias 2013). The preprocessing stage, also known as mechanical recycling, ...