What is E waste Recycling

E waste recycling is the procedure to recover components and materials from outdated electronic devices to build new products. The process is exceptionally important and useful to save humanity from environmental pollution caused by waste electronic elements.

The process of E waste recycling is laborious and extensive. It requires great care, specialization, and passes through a series of events to reach the end.

Let’s have a look at the detailed description of the procedure:

Sorting out and disassembly of items

When waste electronic gadgets are brought into a recycling plant, they are sorted out manually. Wires, batteries, and metals are separated from the main body of a device.

Then, the process of manual dismantling takes place in which the core materials and equipment are retrieved after breaking apart e-waste items. Then, these parts are classified into different categories to check which ones can be reused or need to be sent for the further recycling process.

Reduction process

The objects that are hard to dismantle are reduced to pieces about two inches with other disassembled parts. Later, these particles are spread out with the help of an automated shaking process and crushed further. The dust particles are removed to avoid environmental damage.

See Also: Plastic recycling technology

Separating metallic items

In the next step, metallic items like brass, aluminum, copper, etc. are separated from other elements. To separate the magnetic items from e-waste junk, an over-band magnet is used. It also sets apart the iron and steel items. To separate plastic items from glass, water is used.

E waste recycling process

All dissected items are either used for new manufacturing or sold in the form of raw materials.

E-cycling of components

Different materials pass through the recycling process in various ways. Some of them are:

Hard drives and plastic:

Hard drives are crushed and transformed into aluminum ingots to use in automotive industries. The retrieved plastic material is used to manufacture things like insulators, equipment holders, fence posts, utensils, toys, etc.

Copper:

As copper is a finite resource and can be reused easily, it is often more profitable to recycle it than mining a new one. In the copper recycling process, the metal is relieved from contaminants and loaded into a furnace for melting. Then, it takes the form of rods of specific sizes to use for different purposes.

Mercury:

In the mercury recycling process, specialized technology is used to eliminate mercury from the devices. It is further used for dental amalgams, fluorescent lighting, metric instruments, etc.

Circuit boards:

Circuit boards are delivered to licensed and specialized companies to retrieve valuable materials. The metals such as gold, silver, palladium, tin, copper, etc. are recovered through the smelted process and reused for various purposes.

Batteries:

Through advanced recycling processes, batteries are hulled to extract all types of metals including plastic. Then, they are smelted through a specialized technique to retrieve cobalt, cadmium, steel, nickel, etc. which are further used to build new batteries and steel fabrications.

Glass:

Glass is extracted from computer and television screens. It is retrieved from cathode ray tubes through the size reduction process. After shredding the tube into small pieces, metals are separated from glass material through overband magnets. Then, oxides, phosphors, and ferrous components are also washed away from it.

See Also: Gorilla glass screen protector

In spite of a laborious and complex course of action, e waste recycling is important to save the environment and life on earth. This not only gives industries an opportunity to reuse materials instead of mining new ones but also provides significant financial aid to entrepreneurs, communities, and nations.

Taking into account its manifold benefits, especially to the planet, no one would not like to miss the opportunity of giving their helping hand or support to this great cause.