From an environmental and resource point of view, the specific figures on the current status and emerging trends of plastics for electrical and electronic waste are not very satisfactory. Such an advanced electronics industry has done revolutionary work for humans on the one hand, but it is also one of the main causes of pollution caused by old electronics and the plastics they contain.
Despite the European Union's WEEE Directive and Germany's "Electrical and Electronic Equipment Law" (ElektroG), it is still impossible to completely collect old equipment and recycle them as seamlessly as possible. Recycle raw materials and return them to the economic cycle.
There are many reasons for this situation: society, organization, economy and technology. Overall, their impact is that key parts of old equipment are still buried in landfills, or valuable combustible components are burned.
Inequality: Metal and plastic
electrical and electronic devices are composed of many materials. In recycling these devices, more and more efforts are made to recycle as many metal parts as possible-ferrous metals, non-ferrous metals and precious metals-. Are these metal components "objects of desire"? Various techniques can be used to achieve almost complete metal recovery.
E-waste also contains other valuable materials, such as plastics made from ABS (acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene copolymer), PS (polystyrene) and others that are valuable from an environmental and resource perspective material.
So, in addition to resources, are there metals? Are there any resources? plastic? Play a major role in recycling. However, in reality, so far, this has not actually been the case, because recycling clean plastic fragments from e-waste is much more complicated than recycling metals.
The reason is that the currently available classification options only partially utilize the full raw material potential of plastics. Therefore, a large part of these valuable materials will be lost, for example for thermal energy. Therefore, the task is to convert a higher percentage of plastics from electronic waste to valuable clean plastic fractions, as this is a basic requirement for the electronics industry to use more recycled materials.
The purity of the abrasive material that can be obtained by, for example, electrostatic separation is very high, and in some cases exceeds 99.5%. The recovered material is very clean and can be easily reprocessed into high-quality compounds, which can then be processed into new technical products. In this way, particularly valuable technical raw materials are recovered from materials that cannot be processed. Expensive new products can be replaced with Neu depending on the application, and all or part of them can be replaced by cheap recycled materials. Then, many products can be made entirely from recycled plastic.
Another possible and even more decisive reason for the massive loss of metal and plastic materials in old equipment is their deposition in landfills. If both are controlled in the form of a circular economy, the future environment and raw material supply will be of great help. Therefore, the task is to increase the quantity, quality and efficiency of plastic recycling.
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