A physical separation scheme to improve ammonium thiosulfate leaching of gold by separation of base metals in crushed mobile phones

Abstract

As technology advances, consumers are looking to buy new phones. This phenomenon leads to decrease in life-cycle of mobile phones (ca. 2–3 years), resulting in increase of waste mobile phones. In waste mobile phones, it contains various components including display unit, battery, cases, and printed circuit boards (PCBs). PCBs alone contain variety of materials such as gold (Au), copper (Cu), and iron (Fe) as well as aluminum (Al) with plastics, which causes difficulty in recycling. The coexistence of Cu and Al in crushed mobile phones has been recently reported to cause very low Au extraction efficiency in ammonium thiosulfate medium due primarily to enhanced re-deposition of extracted Au ions via galvanically induced cementation. To limit this antagonistic effect of Cu and Al coexistence on Au extraction, Au-containing components were separated from Cu- and/or Al-bearing parts using a two-step crushing approach in tandem with various physical separation techniques (i.e. jig, hybrid jig, magnetic separation, flotation, and sink-float separation) that were applied on appropriate size fractions. The results showed that over 96% of PCBs, the primary Au-containing material in mobile phones, were recovered after jig separation. These concentrated PCBs were collected and further crushed to liberate Au-containing parts and then treated by diverse physical separation techniques such as magnetic separation, jig separation, hybrid jig separation, flotation, and sink-float separation depending on the crushed particle sizes. Ammonium thiosulfate leaching of the mixed Au-concentrated products from various physical pretreatment techniques showed that Au extraction improved by about 15-fold, indicating that the physical separation scheme proposed in this study is very promising.