Solid waste sorting is an important pre-treatment in recycling to improve the efficiency of material recovery and reduce costs. Motivated by the PEACOC project on metal recovery from solid wastes, an innovative magnetic density separation (MDS) process has been developed for solid waste sorting. It has intrinsic advantages over conventional gravity separation technologies and the previously industrialized MDS process. The new MDS process applies an inclined planar magnet and a horizontal basin containing a static magnetic fluid as the separation medium. A particle sliding phenomenon is identified as a feature that could help the separation. Experiments have been carried out to demonstrate the role of the MDS in concentrating valuable metals in shredded PCBAs and reducing metallic contaminants in plastic fractions of shredded wires. A pilot scale facility is introduced to show the design to achieve continuous production and to reduce the consumption of ferrofluid.

Motivated by the PEACOC project on metal recovery from solid wastes, an innovative magnetic density separation (MDS) process has been developed for granular material sorting. It has intrinsic advantages over the existing industrialized MDS by eliminating fluid turbulence and particle jamming problems. The new MDS applies an inclined planar magnet and a horizontal basin containing a static magnetic fluid as the separation medium. A particle sliding phenomenon is identified as a feature of the process which could help the separation. The MDS successfully sorted shredded PCBAs to concentrate valuable metals and sorted shredded wires to reduce metallic contaminants in the plastic fractions. A pilot scale facility is introduced to show the design to achieve continuous production and to reduce the consumption of ferrofluid.

In order to increase metal recovery from discarded printed circuit board assemblies, an additional preprocessing step where its electronic components are presorted before comminution and metallurgy is suggested. The first step in this process is depopulation where the electronic components are removed from the board. However, currently no practical apples to apples comparison has been performed. Therefore, six depopulation methods (both mechanical and thermal) were directly compared on both qualitative and quantitative indicators and evaluated using a multi-criteria analysis. The mechanical methods were faster less energy intensive than the thermal methods but produced lower quality products and had issues with scaling. Overall the best found method was using a pneumatic hammer due to its simplicity and effectiveness.