Industrial process for recovery of rare earth metals from electronic waste - verification

Purpose and goal

Rare earth metals are essential in the production of most of the electronic goods that are becoming more and more common in everyday life. The production of rare earth metals are done mainly in China at a high environmental cost. In Sweden, annually about 3,500 tons of lamps are discarded, which in turn contain hundreds of tons of phosphor powder. During this project new methods have been developed to refine and extract rare earth metals from the phosphor powder found in these lamps.

Expected results and effects

The scientific work that has been done under the project has led to improvements in the hydrometallurgical methods available for recovering rare earths from the phosphorescent lamps. This work has led to publication of three peer-reviewed articles. Furthermore, a new continuous process has been developed to clean phosphorus powder from the high levels of mercury it contains. During the project the price of the rare earth elements contained in the phosphor powder decreased significantly, but in future it should again become advantageous to recover these from the phosphor powder.

Planned approach and implementation

The work was designed to initially be done in two phases. In the first stage, tests were made to develop and verify the hydrometallurgical methods for extracting rare earths from the phosphor powder. In parallel, market research and investment calculations were made to assess the economy of this. Uncertainties in the price development during the first step made the consortium decide to split the second step into two parts. This was in order to better control the project and make decisions for future investments.