Recovery of the copper layer from waste mobile phone printed circuit board without crushing - Figures 4-6

Resource recovery and material reuse from waste is an art of circular economy. Waste mobile phone printed circuit boards contain a significant quantity of nonferrous and precious metals, where copper is one of the most abundant nonferrous elements.This paper presents the recovery of copper material using an electrochemical process from three samples of waste mobile phone printed circuit boards, two of them double-sided, where for sample preparation, crushing and dismantling are not 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 mass was 1.98 g per sample material. In this way, the copper layer from waste mobile phone printed circuit boards could be recovered early and economically, which could reduce complexity and improve further material recovery compared to the traditional crushing practice.