Tin distribution during smelting of WEEE with copper scrap

Abstract

Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) contains many metals, some of which are valuable (e.g. copper, gold, silver, tin, tantalum, and indium) while others are toxic (cadmium, mercury) so land-filling of WEEE is an environmentally unacceptable and unsustainable practice. Recovering and recycling these materials reduces the amount of primary ores that must be mined and processed and so reduces overall energy consumption as well as conserving increasingly scarce resources. WEEE processing is conveniently performed in highly intensive pyrometallurgical reactors such as the Top Submerged Lance (TSL) reactor. TSL reactors are simple, flexible and can be sized to suit various throughputs. A very attractive way of operating a TSL reactor to recover valuable metals from WEEE is to incorporate it within copper scrap smelting to produce black copper, which is then converted in the same vessel to blister copper. In this work the distribution behaviour of one metal in WEEE - tin - between copper and slags within the CaO-SiO2-FeOx system is reviewed and then measured for olivine slags at 1300 °C. The results are presented and discussed.