Research of leaching of the printed circuit boards coming from waste mobile phones

Abstract

The continuous changing technologies of electronic devices, mainly mobile phones cause that their life is shorten from year to year (even to 8-12 months); that is way there is a constantly increasing amount of generated waste. Such waste treatment to recover mainly copper and other base metals should be really profitable. The process of metals recovery could be done using different methods including pyro- and hydrometallurgical process. The paper describes the research of leaching process of Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) coming from waste mobile phones. As a leaching agent sulfuric acid was used with addition of hydrogen peroxides. Experiments were carried out for different temperature, acid concentration and addition of hydrogen peroxide. As a result the concentration of copper, zinc, iron and aluminium in the obtained solution was measured. The results were discussed.