Recycling critical raw materials from waste electronic equipment
Recycling critical raw materials from waste electronic equipment
Recycling critical raw materials from waste electronic equipment
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<strong>Recycling</strong> <strong>critical</strong> <strong>raw</strong> <strong>materials</strong><br />
<strong>from</strong> <strong>waste</strong> <strong>electronic</strong> <strong>equipment</strong><br />
Table 18: Quantity of precious metals in the hard disk drive platters of a notebook<br />
Ag [mg] Au [mg] Pt [mg] Pd [mg] Rh [mg] Ru [mg]<br />
< 0.1 < 0.1 0.4 < 0.1 < 0.1 < 0.1<br />
3.2 Tantalum<br />
Assembled PCBs contain a range of other metals in addition to the precious metals. In terms<br />
of <strong>critical</strong> <strong>raw</strong> <strong>materials</strong>, tantalum is of particular importance. Tantalum is used in highcapacity<br />
capacitors. As it cannot be recovered in the refining process for precious metals,<br />
there are no data comparable to that in Table 15 and Table 16. Although some older sources<br />
specify a percent by weight of 0.0157% or 4.71 g for a desktop PC (ACRR, undated) nothing<br />
is really known about the basis for this value. Furthermore, this value relates to device<br />
generations <strong>from</strong> the 1990s and should therefore be viewed with caution.<br />
Figure 10: Tantalum capacitors on the motherboard of a notebook (photo Oeko-Institut)<br />
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