LAUSR

The objective of the current study was to investigate environmentally sustainable and energy efficient processes to recover value added material and energy from e-waste as a means to divert these nondegradable materials from landfills. We studied two different types of plastics (1) simple mixtures like polycarbonate/polyamide (PC/PA)) found in cell phone plastics for solvent extraction and (2) complex mixtures like PC/PA/acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS)/poly methyl methacrylate (PMMA) found in many other e-waste streams for pyrolysis. Solvent extraction using N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP) was performed as an alternate to using dichloromethane (DCM) for selective dissolution and recovery of PC from simple mixtures of cell phone plastic (CPP) to avoid the use of chlorinated compounds. Using distillation a recovery of 89% and 87% pure PC was observed for NMP and DCM, respectively. Relatively close to the first run, the recycled NMP also recovered 87% of pure PC. However, in order to reduce energy consump...