Recovery of high purity precious metals from printed circuit boards

Abstract

Waste printed circuit boards (WPCB) have an inherent value because of the precious metal content. For an effective recycling of WPCB, it is essential to recover the precious metals. This paper reports a promising method to recover the precious metals. Aqua regia was used as a leachant and the ratio between metals and leachant was fixed at 1/20 (g/ml). Silver is relatively stable so the amount of about 98 wt.% of the input was recovered without an additional treatment. Palladium formed a red precipitate during dissolution, which were consisted of Pd(NH4)2Cl6. The amount precipitated was 93 wt.% of the input palladium. A liquid-liquid extraction with toluene was used to extract gold selectively. Also, dodecanethiol and sodium borohydride solution were added to make gold nanoparticles. Gold of about 97 wt.% of the input was recovered as nanoparticles which was identified with a high-resolution transmission electron microscopy through selected area electron diffraction and nearest-neighbor lattice spacing. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.