A case study of printed circuit boards recycling by disintegrator technology

Paper in proceeding, 2024

The constant accumulation of Waste Electric and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) at an accelerating pace pose a threat to the environment and people. On the other hand, the WEEE and specifically their component Waste Printed Circuit Boards (WPCBs) are rich in Precious Metals (PMs) and Base Metals (BMs), more than ten times their content in natural ores. Such an opportunity has already attracted the minerals processing industry (e.g., metallurgical companies) to the WEEE recycling problem solving. However, analogically to virgin mining, the presently more or less worthless parts of WPCBs also pose a health threat since they contain toxic pollutants. The key to efficient metal recovery from WPCBs is selective processes for fragmentation and separation which are accurate for both metals and non-metals. Fragmentation is a prerequisite for accurate separation. The closed-circuit grinding (size reduction) method is preferred in the case of WPCB processing, and a prospective technology for carrying it out is High Intensity Impact Milling (HIIM). In this paper, the HIIM (disintegrator) technology is compared with commonly known technologies for selective WPCB size reduction. The HIIM demonstrated possibility to adjust the size reduction process to different materials and replication of the initial results obtained under laboratory conditions.