What exactly is electronic waste and why it's good to recycle?

Electronic waste is an informal but very popular name for all electronic devices at the end of its service life. Because of harmful chemical compounds that these devices contain they fall into the category of hazardous waste, and as such are disposed in specially prescribed containers and later recycled in special recycling stations.

Chemical compounds that can be found in electronic waste are: silicon, cadmium, arsenic, lead, mercury, chromium, beryllium, phosphorus, and some others.

Cadmium is commonly found in personal computer motherboards and motherboards are incidentally the most wanted material for recycling because it contains a large percentage of gold.

Lead is often found in a variety of monitors, and its purpose is to reduce the radiation monitor while working.

Phosphorus is found in CRT, so we can conclude that this element can be found in almost all older monitors known as CRT.



How to recycle electronic waste?

Sony Corporation, the company came up with the idea that instead of dismantling the old electronic equipment, in the same store the old abandoned mine openings. Some of these holes in themselves and can accommodate up to 70 million computers, and later I'd be in that so-called urban ore could remove metals such as copper, gold, iron, glass, and finally for digging and plastics and other nonmetallic elements.

Computers contain a higher percentage of copper than copper ore. For one ton of copper is necessary to dig up and recycle 19 tons of raw material in the form of stone that is covered with these metals.

Mentioned the idea still stands as an idea, as long as they are looking for better solutions for the recycling of waste that is still going on dismantling and sorting of parts that are later recycled.


Four methods used to recycle electronic waste are:

- Dismantling equipment, manual separation of parts that can be reused in the production

- Mechanical removal, removal of harmful components and then chopping and cutting to remove usable parts, such as plastics and metals demand

- Burning and prečišćivanje, having burned fuel components can be extracted metals

- Chemical Processes, noble metals can be removed from the printed circuit board through various chemical processes. Most famous chemical processes for the recycling of gold from electronic is to use compound aqua regia or royal water.