What are the ways to recycle electronic waste and solid waste

Electronic waste usually refers to discarded and no longer used electrical or electronic equipment, mainly including household appliances such as refrigerators, air conditioners, washing machines, televisions, and communication electronic products such as computers, also known as solid electronic waste. So, how can these electronic wastes be recycled?

1. Chemical treatment

Chemical treatment of electronic waste is also called wet treatment. The broken electronic waste particles are placed in an acidic or alkaline liquid, and the leaching liquid is subjected to a series of extraction, precipitation, replacement, ion exchange, filtration and distillation treatments to finally obtain high-grade metals. However, strong acids and highly toxic fluorides are used in the chemical treatment process, which will produce a large amount of waste liquid and emit toxic gases, causing great harm to the environment.

2. Fire treatment

The pyrolysis method is to remove plastics and other metal-rich organic components in electronic waste by incineration, smelting, sintering, melting and other methods. Fire treatment can also cause serious harm to the environment. From the perspective of resource recovery and ecological environmental protection, these methods are difficult to promote. Guiyu Town, Guangdong, my country and other places have adopted these two treatment methods that are more harmful to the environment, which has a serious impact on the local environment and sustainable development.

3. Mechanical treatment

Mechanized treatment of electronic waste is a method of sorting according to the differences in physical properties between components, including disassembly, crushing, sorting and other steps, to recover electronic components and other recycled raw materials. This treatment method is low-cost, simple to operate, not prone to secondary pollution, and easy to scale up. Electronic waste disassembly is usually carried out manually to recycle electronic components that have been tested and are usable. However, due to the large number of electronic components in electronic waste and the complex combination method, the efficiency of manual treatment is very low.

4. Microbial treatment

The use of microorganisms to leach precious metals such as gold is a new technology for extracting precious metals from low-content materials that began to be studied in the 1980s. The activity of microorganisms oxidizes other non-precious metals in precious metal alloys such as gold into soluble substances and enters the solution, while the precious metals are exposed for easy recycling. The use of biotechnology to extract precious metals such as gold is simple, low-cost, and easy to operate, but the leaching time is long. H.brandl et al. used Thiobacillus ferrooxidans to conduct leaching tests on crushed and pre-treated electronic waste. At the selected temperature, pH value and dosage, Cu, Zn, and Ni can be leached by more than 90%. PB is stabilized in the precipitate in the form of PBSO4.

5. Recycling

Some single electronic original waste can also be simply disassembled and returned to the unit for recycling and reuse.

Due to the need to balance the recycling rate of electronic waste and environmental protection, mechanical processing is generally used at present. As a professional manufacturer of electronic waste recycling equipment production lines, if you have any needs in this regard, please feel free to contact us.