Viable plastics recycling from end-of-life electronics

Millions of end-of-life (EOL) electronic products represent more than one million tons of engineering thermoplastics. The economically and environmentally sound recovery of engineering thermoplastics from EOL electronics is a challenge to the sustainability of electronics manufacturing. In this paper, we review the technologies to separate and identify pure post-consumer plastics from EOL electronics, which are followed by the comparison of electronic plastics recycling processes and the network models for plastics recycling processes. We also review successful plastics recycling practices for electronics. In addition, further research directions for recycling plastics from EOL electronics are discussed.