Recycling system for printed wiring boards with mounted parts

A practical recycling system has been developed for Printed Wiring Boards (PWBs) with electronic parts mounted on them. This system consists of part-removing, solder-removing and resin-board pulverizing/separating processes, and recovers useful materials effectively. For the part removal, we developed two types of part-removal apparatuses. One of these successfully removes through-hole devices as well as surface mounted devices from PWBs with almost no damage by heating and impacting the PWBs. The other can effectively remove all parts as crushed by using shear force provided with shearing rollers. Most of the solder is also removed in the part-removal process by heating and impacting, while that remaining on the resin board surface can effectively be removed later by surface abrading followed by heating/impacting. After the removal of the parts by heating/impacting and of the solder, the resin-boards are pulverized and then the resulting materials are separated into a copper-rich powder and a powder consisting of glass fiber and resin (GR powder). The parts (including gold) recovered by using these removal apparatuses are valuable metal resources for refining, while the parts removed by using heat-impact type apparatus have a strong potential to be reused for their original purpose after being checked for reliability. The copper-rich powder is also a copper resource for refining. The GR powder is usable as a filler for polymer products.