The treatment methods of electronic waste mainly include three processes: disassembly, utilization and disposal. Disassembly refers to the disassembly and dismantling of discarded electrical and electronic products by manual or mechanical means for recycling and disposal; utilization refers to the extraction of substances from electronic waste as raw materials or fuels; disposal refers to the use of incineration, landfill or other methods to change the physical, chemical and biological properties of electronic waste after the treatment of electronic waste. The residual materials that cannot be further reused or reused are reduced in volume, reduced or eliminated.
The specific treatment methods of electronic waste include the following:
1. Mechanical treatment: a method of sorting by using the physical property differences between the components, including disassembly, crushing, sorting and other steps. This method is low-cost, simple to operate, not easy to cause secondary pollution, easy to achieve scale, and is a hot spot for development in various countries.
2. Chemical treatment: the crushed electronic waste particles are put into acidic or alkaline liquids, and high-grade metals are finally obtained through a series of processes such as extraction, precipitation, replacement, ion exchange, filtration and distillation. However, this method uses strong acid and highly toxic fluoride, etc., which will produce a large amount of waste liquid and emit toxic gases, causing great harm to the environment.
3. Fire treatment: incinerate, smelt, sinter, melt, etc. electronic waste to remove plastics and other organic components to enrich metals. This method will also cause serious harm to the environment.
4. Microbial treatment: use microorganisms to decompose organic matter in electronic waste, but this method is still in the research stage and is rarely used in practice.
