Separation of non-metallic components in waste printed circuit boards (WPCBs) using organic solvent and potassium phosphate solution

Waste printed circuit boards (WPCBs) contain valuable metals such as Cu, Ni, Au, Ag, and Pd. For an effective recycling of WPCBs, it is essential to recover the valuable metals. In recent years, recycling processes have come to be necessary for separating noble metals from WPCBs due to an increasing amount of electronic device wastes. However, it is well known that glass reinforced epoxy resins in the WPCBs are difficult materials to separate into elemental components, namely metals, glass fibers and epoxy resins in the chemical recycling process. K₃PO₄ as a catalyst in dimethylformamide (DMF) and N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP) was used to depolymerize epoxy resins for recovering metallic and non-metallic components from WPCBs. Reactions of WPCBs were carried out at temperatures 160~200 °C for 2~12 h. The recycled glass fiber from WPCBs was analyzed by thermogravimetric analyzer (TGA) and evaluated the degree of solubility of the epoxy resin for separation efficiencies of the WPCBs.