Process of recycling electronic scrap

On many occasions we already mentioned electronic recycling process but in short steps. This article should provide you more precise and detailed step by step procedure for collecting and recycling electronic scrap.

Step by step recycling chain for electronic scrap consists of various actions you must take care for. In short way, these are steps required: collection, dismantling, shredding, and end-processing of the various materials and metals.


Each step requires experienced specialists with dedicated technologies. If you are not familiar with technologies we mentioned, it is smart thing to do to hire company with experience and technology needed. First 3 steps can be done by anyone with basic knowledge, but the last step requires special techniques and should be done by specialized company dealing with recycling electronic scrap. Last step is the crucial one, which makes the physical recovery of metals back into their pure metallic form. If we speak about environmental impact of recycling process, we must understand how important is to make this process Eco-friendly as much as possible. Transformation of circuit boards and other materials into precious metals, copper and other base and special metals forms is a process we all need, but not with any price.


Any individual which wants to recycle electronic scrap wants to know gold, silver and other metal content inside some scrap categories.


Lets try to answer that question - These are typically categorized into different qualities, depending on their gold content:


very high grade: gold content of minimum 400 ppm
high grade: gold content of minimum 200 ppm
medium grade : gold content of minimum 100 ppm
low grade: gold content of minimum 50 ppm
very low grade: gold content lower than 50 ppm
HINT: Remove large Al/Fe-parts but be careful, especially in case of shredding and sorting, not to lose valuable (precious) metals in side streams. For high and medium grade boards avoid pre-treatment and ship them as they are.


Each recycling process consists of the following operations and services:


Weighing and sampling collected materials - This make sure that material is accurately weighed and sampled. If you have weigh materials right then you can calculate their value more precise. Providing correct weights, moisture content and representative samples for assaying provides numbers to get accurate gold or silver percentage. Besides that, with materials like electronic scrap that contains hazardous substances, precise determination of the material composition is a prerequisite of environmentally sound treatment.


Smelting and refining process - Most recycling companies uses a standardized metallurgical flow sheet, based on copper, lead and nickel as collector metals to secure high recovery yields for all precious metals and numerous other metals. Any plastics or organic residues contained in the input materials are also utilized as a reducing agent and partly as a fuel substitute.


Recycling process can be different from one company to another but they all do the same finish. Extracting gold or some other precious metal. While doing that, many other metals and non metal elements are collected and mostly they all can be recycled for further production process.