Track: Sustainability and Green Systems

Abstract

This research study reviews the treatment and recyclability of e-waste such as PCBs, e-plastics and CRTs. Land filling and incineration were found to be not good management methods as they do not deal with the toxic gases found in e-waste. Hydrometallurgy processing methods was developed and used in the extraction of base and precious metals. Since precious metal leaching is affected by copper content, to maximize precious metal leaching, a 2 step base metal leaching stage was employed. The first step mainly focused on the removal of Pb and Fe and the second step was to extract copper, zinc and nickel. First stage used nitric acid and the second stage used sulphuric acid and hydrogen peroxide. Lead recovery was almost 90% and copper recovery amounted to almost 95%. Precious metal leaching utilized ammonium thio-sulphate as the lixiviant and gold recovery was low,  but silver recovery was significantly high.