A Chinese company uses a recycling system on bare boards and recently they have built a machine called automatic electronic components removal which operator load it up with kilos of boards it spins like a cement mixer and heat the solders melt them and roation make the components fall through a mesh so its output will be bare PCBs, tin solders, and all components on boards.
The bare boards go to their PCB recycling system which basically shred, pulverize and use either a shaker table or dry one to separate fiberglass epoxy from laminted copper sheets used in the bare PCBs.
They use ozone (o3) fired furnace to burn the plastics from the dismatnled components and use dilute sulfuric acid to dissolve base metals, and dissolve the remaining undissolved metals copper, silver, gold and palladium in AR, finally use electrowinnig cell to plate copper, gold, silver and palladium.
Their products from this system is tin ingot, copper powder, gold, silver, palladium and fiberglass which is sold to insulation making companies.
They have fume hoods and waste treatment system, I recieved a quota from them for 150kg per hour full recovery system for $160k. Their automatic dismantling machine seems simple yet effective as you can see in multiple youtube vidoes. It also comes with a fume scruber as it produces some smoke. It costs is around $14k with complete scrubber.
I have tried another method myself, had about a pound of shredded PCBs and removed magnetite components, then leach them using 10% sulfuric acid, after two hours all tin solders or aluminium and solder masks were dissolved, and it looks like copper and gold plating are left. Picture below,
Another option would be to use labour or manual dismantling components, process separately.
Regards,
Kevin
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