SHREDDING
It is a process which is generally referred to as mechanical recycling of E-waste where the used electronic materials are shredded with help of specialized equipment. Once the E-waste is shredded, the individual materials are separated by using Eddy currents and magnetic fields or with help of novel technology like vertical vibration separation.
It is one of the latest techniques that are considered to be very effective for separation of metals like copper and iron from plastics. The metallic portion will be sold for smelters and additional shredded waste will get separated as landfills.
Another byproduct of using this method of separation is fine dust. The resulting dust could be used for production of Portland cement and compensate 30% of the weight.
The analysis of the dust particles indicated that it could mainly aluminum and calcium oxide with smaller amount of copper and lead. This process is very good for separation of plastics from metals but is not suitable for separation of low concentration metals taken from PCBs.