E-Scrap Advances

The primary focus of CR3 is on key sectors of iron and steel, nonferrous structural metals, light metals, rare earths and photovoltaic metals, high-value refractory metals and electronic materials where technology development will address the product manufacturing byproducts, post-consumer scrap, instrumentation, sensors and controls, design for disassembly and conversion of trash to treasure.

CR3 is exploring ways to safely recover and reuse the valuable metals, such as gold, silver, copper, iron and zinc, found in the fine particles that are generated during mechanical processing and in flue dust collected in smelting operations of the electronic scrap.

A research study titled Recovery of Valuable Metals from Flue Dust and Other Fines from Mechanical Treatment of E-Scrap is being conducted at CR3, under the direction of Brajendra Mishra, Kenneth G. Merriam Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts and the director of CR3.

Up until this point, the recovery process of flue dust from the e-waste smelting process has not been fully understood, because there is insufficient information about the constituents of the dust, says Mishra.

Researchers analyzed the content of precious metals such as silver and gold and base metals such as iron and copper.

Original Article: http://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/worcesteri-polytechnic-cr3-escrap-recycling-metals-research/