Characterization of printed circuit boards from scrap printers

Printed circuit boards (PCB) are particularly problematic to recycle because of the heterogeneous mix of organic materials, metals, and glass fiber. PCBs are found in almost every electroelectronic equipment and their recycling process involves a pre-treatment to separate the products which contain targeted metals. In this work, a physical processing involving sequential shredding and hammer milling were used to obtain a comminuted sample from scrap printers PCBs. The thus prepared sample was analyzed for particle size distribution and by optical microscopy as well was subjected to pyrolysis, leachabilty and chemical composition
determination by XRF. The metals concentration was determined by ICP and AAS. The PCBs
have been also analyzed by SEM-EDS (micro-analysis and X-ray mapping). The results show
that the studied PCBs are lead free, multilayer with 4 copper layers, have 45% of metals and the copper is present in significantly higher concentration than the rest of the metals.