A Study on Separating Characteristics of Metals towards Remote Recycling

This study focuses on disassembly and separation processes of recycling of used electronic products. In the previous study, the authors have proposed a concept of remote recycling. The concept can replace manual disassembly and reduce the recycling cost, by carrying out the operation from where labor is relatively inexpensive and sufficient. As a typical electronic product, the paper takes mobile phone as an example and evaluates characteristics in separating valuable metals from used products to examine the feasibility of the concept. It is said that most of the valuable metals of the used electronics are contained in Printed Circuit Board (PCB). Experiment results showed that metals such as Fe, Cu, Al, Cr, Ni and Mg were much more concentrated in roughly crushed and visually separated particles than in manually disassembled PCB. Thus, the paper concluded that visual separation of valuable metals is possible, and this result will be a first step towards implementation of remote recycling.