The composition and discharge of eletro-electronic products is increasing year after year. To avoid the loss of non-renewable mineral resources and energy, the establishment of a recycling loop for such products is necessary. The goal of this work is to study the recycling of parallel wires using unit operations of mineral processing. The following unit operations were used: grinding, size separation, sink-and-float, electrostatic separation, scrubbing, panning and elutriation. One can observe a low contamination grade in the obtained copper. However, in all cases, a two step flow sheet must be used to completely separate plastics from copper. One can conclude that the total liberation of materials during grinding was reached when the final particle sizes were inferior to 3mm.
Recycling; electronic scrap; wires
