E-Waste Dismantling and Recycling Process
Electronics Waste Dismantling and Recycling Process - Understanding the term
After assessing the age, appearance, and overall condition of the product, e-waste recycling companies undertake two different procedures:
1.Recycling:
They utilize secure methods to maximise the recyclability of IT and electronic assets while maintaining privacy of information.
Disassembling: In line with their commitment to the environment, they dismantle and recover parts and components from the e-waste. Through this process, they identify whether e-waste is in need of repair or not.
Physical Destruction: To maximize value from the process of e-waste disposal, they sort reusable items and dispose the trash and hazardous waste properly.
Commodity Sale: After breaking down and separating all materials, they sell products like, hard disks, motherboards, server parts, storage devices, switches, routers, hubs, modems etc. to prospective buyers and recycle items like plastics, metals, batteries, LCD displays etc.
2. Refurbishing:
Inspection: After a thorough analysis of the e-waste, they pick up the parts which can be repaired and still put to use.
Data Destruction: Before disposing of potentially sensitive items like computers, laptops, mobile devices etc, they ensure a safe and secure data destruction, so that these devices or other network equipment do not result in a data or privacy breach.
Testing & Refurbishing: Under this process, the products go through several testing phases. Sub-standard components are replaced or upgraded before offered for resale. Selling to Prospective Buyers (Re-marketing): They offer fully refurbished laptops, computers and other electronic devices for purchase.True environmental sustainability with all focus materials and residual materials recycled to the highest environmental, health and safety standards.Straight to smelter with focus materials such as CRT glass and circuit boards. Strict downstream vendor auditing to ensure nothing is illegally exported.
It depends upon the electronics recycling company you employ. But I think the most basic thing is that you call them, they pick up your e-waste and maybe do some data destruction service if necessary—if that is part of the service package. Then the recycler will then take apart your electronic and set aside the parts that can still be recycled. The rest will undergo secure equipment data destruction. Like I said, I’m not sure if this is true to all recyclers but I understand that this is mostly the process with All Green.
With the manufacturing of E-waste day by day, it’s the keen responsibility of the organizations to recycle them in a timely manner. One can resolve the E-waste problem by searching a professional E-waste recycler. You must prefer to hire one of the best Ewaste companies that will take your old electronics away, separate, and recycle them. An E-waste recycler meets the highest standard how to recycle the unwanted electronic stuff.
Why is recycling e-waste so difficult?
This stuff - Lead
It’s in everything, particularly solder, which is used to stick everything together. Ideally, you would just stick everything into a big furnace and melt it all down, then separate the parts by density. As we say in Canada “Well, you could do that”. The problem is that if lead is in the mix, any temperature hot enough to melt the other metals (as well as the non-metallic components) will release toxic amounts of lead vapour. It turns to a gas at a relatively modest 1749 Celsius. When you’re smelting lead, you want to keep everything well below that temperature.
That’s not just a problem for the workers. That’s a problem for anyone near the smelter.
And lead has an annoying habit of being more reactive than most of the other metals, meaning it will combine with oxygen to form lead oxides, which form dust, which gets everywhere, and are just as toxic. Secondly, there is a market for lead. However, it’s still not very valuable so what usually happens is if you get anything valuable out of the e-waste you’re going to be stuck with a lot of metallic lead. And recycled lead is easy to get - lead acid batteries are really just lead in solution. You can get the lead back by running a current through the acid (which is how batteries work after all), which leaves you with pure lead that can be smelted fairly safely - lead has a really low melting point.
How efficient is electronic waste recycling?
There are 2 companies out of maybe several. One from Yale Recycling that crushes most of the technologically obsolete and/or out-dated cellphones, smartphones, and other electronic devices and separates the plastic and the glass, leaving the circuits exposed by crushing and pulverization. Thereafter these metallic constituents are separated by electrolytical deposition…sort of meaning this company can separate each valuable metal by its electrical characteristics.
The other company does mostly gold deposition by applying microbes into the mixtures of the various metals and thereafter the microbes start to release the gold from the mixture and is deposited onto various plates.
Efficiency would most likely occur if there are the millions of smartphones and cellphones and/or other types of electronic wastes, of which there are, too, the costs and labor of collecting, crushing, pulverizing, and processing and the disposal of wastes.
There is an average of $1 worth of gold, and not counting the other valuable metals, smartphone meaning we would need to collect, crush, pulverize, and process at least 2000 smartphones to acquire 1 ounce of gold….also meaning that 1 smartphone has only 1/2000 of an ounce per.
This is according to the World Wide Web.
What are the different methods used in reusing and recycling e-waste (electronic waste)? What are the different methods and equipment for extracting precious metals like gold, copper and rare earth metals? What is unusable and gets disposed?
Reuse
Electronics manufacturers and e-waste recycling companies differ in their efforts to refurbish devices or take them apart for spare parts. Recent types of cell phones, computers or TVs are usually checked and refurbished or disassembled for spare parts (by hand), but other devices often are not.
Recycling
E-waste generally consists of plastic or metal casings, electronic circuit boards (chips), batteries and wiring. E-waste recycling can be profitable as many devices contain precious metals like platinum, gold, silver, copper, tin, aluminium, but also rare earth metals. The recycling process at a professional recycling company usually consists of the following steps:
Sorting the devices
An e-waste recycler will generally sort devices by type first, because some devices may be reusable and because different devices require different methods of manual disassembly.
Manual disassembly
Depending on the device, some manual disassembly may be done. For example batteries are removed, cartridges and toners are removed from printers, parts of TVs and monitors will be disassembled to remove the toxic lead and mercury that may be present.
Shredding
Next the devices are generally shredded to pieces. Some recyclers first shred into fairly large pieces (about 10 cm). Then they remove toxic materials such as batteries and shred again into smaller pieces (of about 1 cm). Other recyclers immediately shred into small pieces.
Sorting the pieces
The shredded pieces are processed further using (a combination of) a number of methods; manual sorting, removing metals with a magnet, filtering materials based on density (using vibrating conveyor belts or centrifuges), identifying materials with infra-red light.
Removing contaminants
Extracted metals are generally treated with acid and smelted to remove contaminants. Some recyclers also sell glass and plastic pieces, but those are not always reusable and are often incinerated or dumped on landfills.
Dumping
Sadly, the larger part of all e-waste is not recycled by a professional recycling companies. A lot of e-waste is dumped in landfills or (illegally) shipped to countries where people process the waste without proper equipment and protection. This usually leads to worker health problems and large environmental problems.
Scrapping
There are individuals (both in developed and developing countries) called scrappers who like to recycle e-waste themselves and earn some money with this. This 'scrapping' is not without risk as many electronic devices contain toxic materials like brominated flame retardants, lead, mercury, cadmium or chromium. Also, some of the recycling processes require other toxic chemicals (e.g. acid treatments) for proper extraction.