About ReCEOL

The Recycling of End-of-Life Products (ReCEOL) project was a collaboration between the University College Cork (UCC) and Composite Recycling Limited, which began in 2018 and ended in 2021. The project was co-funded by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Ireland, the Geological Survey of Ireland (GSI) and the European Union ERA-MIN2 programme and was supported by Freiberg Technical University (Germany), Coolrec (Belgium), Alumisel (Spain) and Muldenhütten Recycling und Umwelttechnik (Germany).

The Challenge

The rise in business and consumer demand for electronics has created one of the fastest waste streams in the European Union (EU). Currently, roughly 38% of electronics that enter the market are collected; the rest are discarded (EC, 2020).

Electronics are a complex waste stream as they can be composed of a mix of materials from rare earths to precious metals to plastics. Every year it is estimated that around 400,000 tonnes of Printed Circuit Boards (PCB’s) are generated in the EU of which over 90% are sent to landfill or are incinerated (Cordis, 2022). Many of the materials in the PCB’s are valuable, scarce and in demand, such as copper, gold, silver, solder and indium, but many are lost during the recycling and recovery process.

The Circular Solution

ReCEOL developed a patented recycling process to recover metals from waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) from PCB, Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD), batteries and Automobile Shredder Residue (ASR). The waste materials from the components described above are added to molten salt at operating temperatures of 300-450°C (Cordis, 2022). The molten salt separates the metals at the bottom of the reactor, while the solid copper floats on the solder making material recovery easier (Cordis, 2022). This process also enables scaling by doubling the surface area of the molten material, which doubles the throughput (Cordis, 2022).

Climate Impact

The research carried out by ReCEOL has proven yields of 95% can be achieved for copper, steel and solder which exceeds the current industry rates of 70% to 80% (Cordis, 2022). Aluminium, solder, and steel can be separated and recovered. Critical raw materials such as Indium and Tantalum can be recycled. This recycling process developed by ReCEOL can recover metals from low value PCBs. The process has several benefits over existing alternatives, including eliminating the need for shredding plus a low capital cost, given its established nature.

The project also contributes to environmental preservation by efficiently extracting raw materials from WEEE, preventing them from being lost in landfills or incinerated, and reducing dependency on virgin-metal mining.

Replicability

A printed circuit board recovery (PCBRec) plant’s Internal-Rate-of-Return (IRR) is projected to be more than 15% for low value Waste Printed Circuit Boards (WPCBs) and 80% for medium value WPCBs (Cordis, 2022). These IRR amounts do not account for the recovery of precious metals such as gold or silver (Cordis, 2022). Moreover, significant regulatory drivers, such as the WEEE Directive, exist in the EU to stimulate the future development of PCBRec technology and the circular economy in the electronics industry.

Because the technology is modular, capacity may be increased in a systematic manner (Cordis, 2022). ReCEOL’s process is reproducible and cost effective because it uses existing processes from established industries.

A few Irish companies of note in the WEEE recovery industry include:

Votechnik, a CIRCULÉIRE member, develops a series of deep technologies from lab to market in the space of circular economy for LCD and flat panel display (FPD) recycling.

KMK Metals Recycling, a CIRCULÉIRE member, provides environmentally sound management of waste metal in all forms. They collect and process 75% of Ireland’s WEEE.