Affiliation:
1. Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh
Abstract
Resource recovery and material reuse from waste is an art of circular economy. Waste mobile phone printed circuit boards contain a significant amount of nonferrous and precious metals, where copper is one of the dominant nonferrous elements. This paper presents the recovery of copper material using an electrochemical process from three samples of waste mobile phone printed circuit boards, each double-sided, where for sample preparation no crushing and dismantling are applied except that the painting mask is chemically removed. From mass analysis, the gross amount of the recovered copper from the sample materials was 5.94 g and the calculated average was 1.98 g per sample material. In this way, the copper layer from waste mobile phone printed circuit boards could be recovered economically at an early stage, which could reduce complexity and improve further material recovery compared to the traditional crushing practice.