Are electronic components from waste pcb boards worth recycling?

Are electronic components from waste pcb boards worth recycling? This issue needs to be disscussed from two different ways: 1. to reuse the electronic components as functional parts 2. to revocer metal and no-metal.

Are electronic components reusable?

Pulling electronic components off PCBs and recycling the components for use again as functional parts is not practical or economical. The parts are easy to damage and they would need retesting to ensure they still worked. Such parts would be of poor quality and the labour costs of recycling would be huge compared with bulk produced new parts. Most parts now need to be taped and reeled. Trying to re-tape and reel parts pulled off old circuit boards is completely impractical because of the cost.

Direct recycling of scrap unpopulated PCBs themselves into other products is possible, but this only occurs on a very small scale. The process is laborious and the finished products are problematic. In order to reuse scrap PCB and make a beer mat for instance, suitable source material has to be hand sorted and rough cut to a standard shape. Blanks must be drilled and pinned for CNC routing. After routing, edges must be de-burred since where the router cuts through a hole since a razor sharp metal shard may be left. The safety and look and feel of such finished products is dubious.

Recover metal and nonmetal from pcb electronic components

Waste PCBs has great residual value due to the presence of high-grade precious metals such as Au, Ag, Cu, Pd, Ta and so on.

Capacitors are one of the main components in electronic and electrical products. Most capacitors are made of PET film or PP film, iron needles (also called electronic feet, outer tinned and inner layered copper), aluminum foil and outer red or green paint shell composition. After equipment processing, it is concluded that there are about 30% aluminum sheets, about 10% iron pins, about 25% black rubber tips, and about 35% oil paper and plastic in the capacitor. After environmental protection treatment, they can be reused. So the recycling value is great. The recycling value of waste capacitors is great, and waste capacitors can be refined into aluminum ingots.

To remove electronic components from the circuit board, we usually use our circuit board dismantling machine. It melts the tin by heating, and then the electronic components will fall off, the equipment can save a lot of manpower. Then you can use precious metal refining equipments to extract precious metals such as gold, silver and palladium from obtained electronic components. Naked motherboards can be processed by crushing, grinding and separating by our circuit board recycling equipment to get pure copper powder and resin powder.

Summary

Obviously, to recycle electronic components from waste pcb boards as functional parts is not practical or economical. But, recycling precious metal from pcb boards and electronic components not only protects the environment, but also an option with investment value.