Revista de Ingeniería Civil y Ambiental

Optimization Studies on E-waste for the Recovery of Zinc and Aluminium by Electro Deposition

Abstract

P Sivakumar*, D Prabhakaran and M Thirumarimurugan

The world produces 50 million tons of electronic and electrical waste (e-waste) per year, according to a recent UN report, but only 20% is formally recycled. The rest ends up in landfill, or is recycled informally in developing nations. E-waste recycling market in India is predominantly controlled by unorganized sector due to absence of stringent laws and policy framework. Electronics products in the country are reaching their end of life sooner than expected, which has created immense pressure on the government to come up with appropriate laws to promote e-waste recycling and management. Most electronics that are improperly thrown away contain some form of harmful materials such as beryllium, cadmium, mercury and lead. These materials might be trace elements, but when added up in volume, the threat to the environment is significant. However electronic waste also contains fair percentage of precious metals like Cu, Ag, Au, Pt etc. These metals can be recovered from e-waste at cheaper cost than from the usual ores. Several techniques are used to recover precious metals like copper, silver and gold. This paper deals with the collection and segregation of precious metal rich e-waste scrap and leaches zinc and Aluminium effectively by adopting the technique namely Electrodeposition. The composition of Zinc and Aluminium present in the resultant leached product from each technique is analyzed by EDS. A manual comparison of purity, yield percentage, energy consumption will be tabulated and optimization for the three processes will be simulated using Response Surface Methods (RSM) in design-expert software v.11.