Wasted printed circuit boards, PCBs, contain not only valuable metals such as Cu, Au, etc., but also smelting-repellent components such as Al, Br, and Sb. The latter should be removed before feeding them to the smelting process. In this study, we applied the processes as a pretreatment such as (i) heating and screening to remove devices on the PCBs, (ii) roasting to remove/decompose Br and Sb from PCBs, (iii) two-stage selective grinding to concentrate Cu and to remove Al bearing glass fiber, and (iv) high gradient magnetic separation to concentrate Ni bearing Cu and Au. Then, we demonstrated that the above process concentrated Au and Cu with high recovery and remove most of the Al, Br, and Sb components from the wasted PCBs.
