Chapter 3 - Physical Separation Processes in Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Recycling

Abstract

The amount of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) will continue to increase in the coming decades, with an expected rate of at least 4% a year, about three times higher than the growth of the average municipal waste because the market of electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) is growing very fast in the world. WEEE is part of urban mining for valuable recyclable products such as metals, plastics, wood, and others. Their separation can be performed by using mechanical-physical processing, which is an indispensable technology in the practice of recycling WEEE. The transfer of mineral processing techniques to WEEE recycling has just started in this field. Mechanical-physical processing such as shredding, screening, shape separation, magnetic separation, eddy current separation, and electrostatic separation must be adapted to treat various forms of spent materials efficiently. This chapter describes most of physical separation techniques usually used in recycling and processing of WEEE and presents some examples of processing of different WEEE categories.