Electrical Wastes

Electrical and Electronic Equipment waste is referred to in the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive, which requires organisations to take ownership of the disposal of loosely discarded, surplus, obsolete, or broken electrical or electronic devices in a tiered and controlled manner. Electronic articles that fall under the WEEE Directive and RoHS Directive, contain hazardous substances, e.g. mercury in switches, lead in solder and cadmium in batteries. Since 1st July 2006, these materials are being progressively phased out, which should ease the hazardous waste load over the next few years. Most electrical and electronic products have lifetimes of 10 years, so after 2016 electronic recycling will primarily focus on precious metal recovery, with less emphasis on hazardous material.

As time progresses, WEEE will increasingly be seen as a valuable source of precious metals, and town mining will become a more attractive option for material supply. This is due to the increased pressures on companies to contribute towards natural resource conservation and the difficulties and rising costs in extracting these materials from primary sources.

How Tetronics can help unlock value from this process

Tetronics offers metal recovery plants to meet a growing number of resource recovery challenges including for the extraction of precious metals from WEEE. The process chemistry in Tetronics’ plasma‐enhanced recovery technology is designed to symbiotically and preferentially separate and recover the valuable material whilst destroying any hazardous components. The remaining non-valuable material is vitrified into an inert, safe disposable non‐hazardous material in a single processing step. Any plastics can be converted to synthesis gas for direct utilisation or used as a fuel supplement minimising the plasma power requirements. The robust level of construction and minimal number of moving components delivers outstanding plant longevity. The recovery process also has exceptional environmental and commercial credentials and can be considered as a future‐proof solution for electrical waste management problems.

Applied Materials Technology Corp., Taiwan
Refining technology is of course important to us, and we are confident that Tetronics’ plasma solution provides higher levels of technical recovery than any competing technology.