Characterizing the Materials Composition and Recovery Potential from Waste Mobile Phones: A Comparative Evaluation of Cellular and Smart Phones

Abstract

Electronic waste (e-waste) is one of the fastest growing waste streams around the world, and waste mobile phones contribute a major portion of this waste, in terms of the number of units. Thus, in order to fully discover the constituent materials and systematically evaluate the recovery potentials for waste mobile phones, we dismantled 20 waste mobile phones, manufactured between 2001 and 2015, into 7 main parts. We wanted to determine all the valuable materials and precious metals in these devices and to compare the differences between cellular and smart phones. The results show that cellular phones were evolving into smaller sizes between 2001 and 2012, while the smart phones were becoming higher in mass between 2006 and 2015. The composition analysis showed that a smart phone typically contained approximately 260 various metallic and nonmetallic parts, while a cell phone contained about 150. The experimental analysis of precious metals in waste mobile phones indicated that one kg of cellular phones contained approximately 1,600 mg of silver, 186.5 mg of gold, and 36.9 mg of palladium (on average) and about 1,732.9 mg of silver, 190.9 mg of gold, and 40.1 mg of palladium (on average) were contained in one kg of smart phones. The information obtained in this study shows that waste mobile phones could constitute a potential new resource for the sustainable secondary mining of rare and precious metals.

Toxicity trends in E-Waste: A comparative analysis of metals in discarded mobile phones

“…Actually, these results could help inform smartphones manufactures and relevant decision makers (such as Recyclers, government agencies, and designers) around the world to further lessen the use of toxic metals, put forward effective prevention and control measures during the EoL stage, and recover precious metals, specifically in developing countries where the collection and recycling rates are very low (Singh et al, 2018;Borthakur and Govind, 2017;Zeng et al, 2017). Specifically, the growing generation of obsolete mobile phones provides huge potentials of secondary mining or urban mining.…”

“…The most important approaches to manage WMPs in a sustainable way have focused on dismantling, recycling, and material resources recovery (Chen et al, 2016;Singh et al, 2018), but industrial-scale implementation still is a challenge because of the lower economic incentive of processing mixed WMPs components. For example, China produces as many as 450 million mobile phones annually.…”

E-waste recycling intention paradigm of small and medium electronics store managers in Bangladesh: An S–O–R perspective

“…Singh et al (2018) conducted research on a sample of waste from market-dominant, basic phones and smartphones manufactured between 2001 and 2015. Using this sample, the researchers experimented for toxicity trends based on 19 chemicals.…”

Uncovering material flow analysis of waste cathode ray tubes television in China

“…Refrigerator Recovery of metal resources from e-waste streams is widely perceived as the best option to prevent their loss to the environment, and most importantly to reduce their potential supply limitations in the future (Singh et al, 2018;Zeng et al, 2016).…”