Dismantling and electrochemical copper recovery from Waste Printed Circuit Boards in H2SO4–CuSO4–NaCl solutions

Abstract The worldwide growing of electrical and electronic equipment makes increasingly urgent to find environmentally friendly treatments for e-waste. In this paper, the attention has been focused on i) the eco-friendly dismantling of the electronic components from Waste Printed Circuit Boards and ii) recovering of pure metallic copper, which is the most abundant metal and one of the most valuable in Printed Circuit Boards. After an experimental optimization study, we found that a solution containing 0.5 M H2SO4, 0.4 M CuSO4, and 4 M NaCl can be successfully used to disassemble the electronic components from the boards by leaching of all exposed metals. Air was blown into the leaching sol…