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Pyrolytic urban mining of waste printed circuit boards: an enviro-economic analysis

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Abstract

E-waste, a global environmental concern resulting from supply chain inefficiency, also offers the opportunity to recover valuable materials, including general and rare earth metals. Waste printed circuit boards (WPCBs) are integral components of e-waste that contains substantial amounts of precious metals, making them a valuable waste category. Pyrolysis has emerged as a promising method for material recovery from WPCBs. Hence, pyrolytic urban mining of WPCBs offers an excellent avenue for resource recovery, redirecting valuable materials back into the supply chain. Under the current study, experimental investigation has been conducted to explore the recovery of materials from WPCBs through pyrolysis followed by process simulation, economic analysis, and life cycle assessment (LCA). An Aspen Plus simulation was conducted to model the pyrolysis of WPCBs and subsequent product recovery using a non-equilibrium kinetic model, which represents a unique approach in this study. Another distinct aspect is the comprehensive assessment of environmental and economic sustainability. The economic analysis has been carried out using Aspen economic analyzer whereas the LCA of WPCB pyrolysis has been conducted using the SimaPro software. The experimental investigation reveals yield of solid residues are about 75–84 wt.%, liquid yields of 6–13 wt.%, and gas yields of 4–21 wt.%, which is in well agreement with the Aspen Plus simulation results. The economic analysis for an e-waste pyrolysis plant with an annual feed rate of 2000 t reveals that the total capital cost of a pyrolysis plant is nearly $51.3 million, whereas the total equipment cost is nearly $2.7 million and the total operating cost is nearly $25.6 million. The desired rate of return is 20% per year and the payback period is 6 years with a profitability index of 1.25. From the LCA, the major impact categories are global warming, fossil resource scarcity, ozone formation in human health, ozone formation in terrestrial ecosystems, fine particulate matter formation, and water consumption. The findings of this study can serve as a guideline for e-waste recyclers, researchers, and decision-makers in establishing circular economy.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the help received from Department of Chemical Engineering, Jadavpur University for providing the access to Aspen PLUS software. The authors also acknowledge Prof. Sudipta De, for extending the cooperation to use the SimaPro software for LCA analysis.

Funding

Financial support was extended by the state government of West Bengal through research fellowship to the first author.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chemical Engineering Department, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

    Biswajit Debnath, Shubha Kayal & Ranjana Chowdhury

  2. Mechanical Engineering Department, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

    Soumitra Pati & Sudipta De

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  1. Biswajit Debnath
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  2. Soumitra Pati
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  3. Shubha Kayal
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  4. Sudipta De
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Contributions

Biswajit Debnath: conceptualization, experimentation, data curation, process modeling, economic analysis and writing—original draft preparation; Soumitra Pati: Aspen simulation, economic analysis, LCA execution and writing—original draft preparation; Shubha Kayal: LCA data collection, LCA framework and analysis; Sudipta De: LCA software curation and analysis; Ranjana Chowdhury: kinetic analysis, writing—review and editing and supervision.

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Correspondence to Ranjana Chowdhury.

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Debnath, B., Pati, S., Kayal, S. et al. Pyrolytic urban mining of waste printed circuit boards: an enviro-economic analysis. Environ Sci Pollut Res 31, 42931–42947 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-024-33923-5

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