Abstract
The consensus is growing for the UN sustainable development goals regarding responsible consumption, production, and climate actions. Because of growth towards a digital society (“industry 4.0 revolution”), it is needed to have our resources and economies to be circular. The success also depends on appropriate management of critical raw materials, such as Rare Earth Elements (REEs). Here, a cost-effective recycling method for the recovery of single REEs from fluorescent powder (FP) with end-of-life lamp e-waste is presented with the additional benefit of having a much less environmental impact than mining. The recycling method involves a carefully designed sequential digestion of two phosphor components (YOX and LAP) and treating their leachates separately under specific hydrometallurgical conditions. The phosphors were targeted for Yttrium (Y), Europium (Eu), Terbium (Tb), Lanthanum (La), Cerium (Ce), and Gadolinium (Gd). On trace REEs basis, the leaching process with the FP showed >95% recovery for Eu, La, Ce, Y and Tb. The effective recycling was achieved to >99% purity for Y, Eu, and Tb in 1, 25, and 55 liquid-liquid extraction stages, respectively. To our knowledge, this is one of the first methods to leach and separate Tb from FP e-waste with near quantitative leaching efficiency and >99% purity.
Highlights
Digitalisation and use of electronic equipment and gadgets have triggered a substantial increase in e-waste with an astonishing 10% growth rate per year (Balde, 2014)
Some Rare Earth Elements (REEs) are already identified as critical raw materials (CRMs) by the European Union and the US department of energy and defence (Achzet et al, 2011; Zhou et al, 2017)
Recycling technologies for fluorescent powder (FP) e-waste are often restricted by different boundary conditions, such as in-homogeneity of feedstock, immature technologies and processes that are often designed for front-end productions, high recycling costs, and low commercialvalued impure recycled products
Summary
Digitalisation and use of electronic equipment and gadgets have triggered a substantial increase in e-waste with an astonishing 10% growth rate per year (Balde, 2014). Referred as industrial vitamins and the key to the “Industry 4.0 revolution”, Rare Earth Elements (REEs) are vital for our futuristic technologies for high tech applications in electronics, cleantech, energy, mobility, aviation, space, healthcare and futuristic digital and computing applications and personal wearables. The lanthanide contraction effect makes their sizes and properties very similar and their separation from one another very difficult as well as that as they tend to co-exist in ores (Dupont and Binnemans, 2015; Gschneidner et al, 2004; Tan et al, 2016; Venkatesan et al, 2018; Yin et al, 2017) Their mining, separation and processing need special techniques and elaborate processes. The developed process for real FP ewaste has the possibility to scale up, high throughput using liquid-liquid extraction, cheaper process economics as compared to conventional options
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