Printed Circuit Board Innovative Solution

ended

In 2015 the number of mobile phones overcame the number of human beings on planet heart. This figure is representative of way more complex scenario in which thousands of tons of electronic products are daily placed in the market, substituting the old ones. As a consequence, the amount of electronic waste is dramatically increasing. The industrial plants that can treat this kind of waste are limited. As a result, what can’t be treated in Europe is sent outside the borders to be treated in developing countries where the cost of the labor is reduced and environmental legislation is often poor. While we give away all the content of this waste, we import raw materials in order to produce new electronics. Nothing farer from the circular economy approach envisaged by the European commission. The specific target of the present PCBIS project is the waste printed circuit board (WPCB), that in most of the cases is treated with a pyrometallurgical approach, making use of high temperature in order to obtain the separation of metals and the volatilization of plastics; it is really effective in this task, but it has two major limitations: i. Very high opex; ii. Increasing environmental limits force to continuous update of the plants. Our project aims to recover metals from Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) with innovative electrochemical technologies that do not require large scale in order to be economically sustainable. This allows for the development of a diffuse network of industrial sites all across the Europe, reducing the environmental cost of WPCBs delivery. In our process the most important reagent will be the electron, which is a clean reagent that can be also produced on site by coupling the electrochemical cells with renewable energy sources such as photovoltaic PVs. When compared to pyrometallurgy, it is possible to see how an impressive reduction of both the (i.) use of fossil fuels and (ii.) greenhouse gases emission will be obtained.