Breakthrough in smartphone recycling tech announced
Wednesday, April 18, 2018 - 10:05:05
Researchers at the University of British Columbia revealed this week that they have worked out a way to improve the efficiency of mobile phone recycling and make it a more eco-friendly process, according to Science Daily.
The specific advance has been made in the way that organic and inorganic materials are separated from one another, which means that the fibreglass components of a modern handset can be extracted from the resin used to fix them in place.
Fibreglass is a key material used in the production of circuit boards and when old mobile phones are recycled, it is usually thrown away while the precious metals and other minerals are recovered for reuse.
This breakthrough means that the fibreglass found in unwanted handsets can now be completely cleaned and reclaimed as part of the mobile phone recycling process. It can then be turned into other things, such as insulation for buildings, so that it does not simply go to waste.
In the long term, the aim is to make it possible to recycle and reuse every single part of an outdated smartphone, ensuring that even if it is no longer functional it will not end up in a landfill site.
At the moment, there is still a lot of progress which needs to be made in order to turn this dream into a reality, but successful research projects like this prove that there is a lot of hope for the sustainability of the mobile industry.
Selling an old phone so that it can be fixed up and returned to circulation where another user will buy it is the most efficient way to deal with unwanted devices. But as recycling becomes more sophisticated and more developments come to light, this may not always be the case.
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