Next generation urban mining - Automated disassembly, separation and recovery of valuable materials from electronic equipment: overview of RD approaches and first results of the European project ADIR

摘要

An overview will be presented on current R&D activities of the European project ADIR - running since 9/2015 - dealing with the automated disassembly, separation and recovery of valuable materials from electronic equipment. Main focus are end-of-life cell phones and printed circuit boards from server and network electronics.To date the material specific recycling is focused on mass stream concepts such as shredder processes and metallurgy to extract the high-value metallic constituents, i.e. copper, gold and silver. However, a series of critical elements cannot be recovered efficiently or is even lost in dust or residual fractions.