Recovery of basic valuable metals and alloys from E-waste using microwave heating followed by leaching and cementation process

Abstract

The whole world understands about the crisis of harmful electronic waste as it is increasing the usage and its disposal. The Government of India asked researchers to come out with innovative alternative solutions, apart from existing conventional methods for safe reuse, recycling and proper disposal particularly for electronic solid waste system. The solution is found which consists of microwave heat treatment followed by acid leaching. The e-waste was first crushed and then the sample was melted in microwave heat treatment to recover the valuable metal in the form of metallic mixture. This mixture was further subjected to acid leaching process in the presence of hydrogen peroxide to form leached liquor. The analysis with X-ray diffraction, image mapping and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy shows that the leached liquor sample mainly contain iron, aluminum and copper, mostly in the form of alloys. The results with field-emission scanning electron microscope analysis, also shows that approximately ninety percent leaching efficiency is observed for nickel, cobalt and copper with hydrochloric acid as solvent, whereas iron and aluminum produced less than forty percent. Further, these results are also compared with the existing methods based on the response surface method through thermal plasma process.