Inverse Production for Sustainable Recycling Routes – New Developments for Automated Disassembly of End-of-Life Electronics

Abstract

At the end of the lifetime of electronic products, many of the valuable substances contained therein are still lost. These products could be selectively disassembled with modern production methods in order to win high-quality sorting fractions. The article presents approaches to these challenges of inverse production and discusses examples of current developments for the automated disassembly of electronic boards. Modern sensor and laser technology plays a key role in measurement and disassembly tasks. A dismantling and sorting line for a piece-by-piece processing of cell phones and printed circuit boards with seven interlinked machines was set up and tested at a recycling plant.