Recycling options for LEDs and LED products

LEDs have become important components for electronic products. Beside materials like copper, gold, silver, tin and plastics, LEDs consist of critical and scarce materials like indium, gallium, and rare earth elements. A high market share and a high number of used LEDs can be found in the applications of lighting products, liquid crystal displays (LCD) and cell phones. The European funded project “Cycling resources embedded in systems containing Light Emitting Diodes” (cycLED), started in January 2012, is aimed at the investigation and the improvement of the recycling options for LEDs and LED products. The project consortium is facing to big challenges to achieve the defined objectives: There is no specific collection scheme implemented for LEDs and LED products so far, the contents of rare materials incorporated in LEDs are in competition with other valuable materials and the process technologies for refining precious or scarce materials has to be evaluated and developed.