Treatment of Electrical and Electronic Waste to Reduce Environmental Issue

Abstract

Electrical and electronic wastes (e-waste) are harmful to the environment and human life due to it contain non degradable and hazardous components. Treatment of ewaste is important in order to reduce the environmental issues. Conversion of e-waste into valuable products including liquid oil is believed as one of the good ways to solve the problem. For this purpose, application of microwave technology for e-waste pyrolysis and liquid oil product distillation is very interesting because of the rapid heating processes of materials. This study reported on e-waste processing techniques and specifically highlights the use of microwave technology to convert laptop computer case into liquid oil. The treatment of laptop computer case in this work included microwave pyrolysis of the sample and microwave distillation of the liquid oil product. The result showed that the average yield of liquid oil from pyrolysis of laptop computer case was about 37 % by mass. After liquid oil distillation process, the average yields of each fuels fraction were 67.6 vol.% gasoline, 42.1 vol.% kerosene, 42.8 vol.% diesel, and 14.1 vol.% heavy fuel and residue.