#Industry ·2026-02-16
At 4 a.m., the electronic waste transfer trucks quietly entered the park. The doors opened, and bundles of used mobile phones and computer motherboards, like butterflies with broken wings, were dumped into the intake. They once powered the information flood, but now only the battle between precious metals and toxic metals remains. At this moment, the circuit board recycling equipment lit up green, like a calm emergency doctor, beginning to "rescue" these silent lines. The first step is the "crushing" process. The two-axis shredder opened its alloy steel teeth, chewing the entire board into two-centimeter fragments. The flying copper foil was like golden snowflakes, and the resin powder turned into gray snow dust. The closed negative pressure system sucked away the brominated flame retardants that might escape, preventing dioxins from forming in the air. The fragments climbed up the conveyor belt and entered the magnetic separator, where iron nails and steel covers were lifted out by magnets, like picking stones from rice, making a clear "clacking" sound. Next comes "heart bypass" — low-temperature crushing and eddy current sorting. Liquid nitrogen instantly froze the fragments to minus 80 degrees Celsius, turning the resin brittle like frozen bread, easily peeling off the copper foil with a light tap. The eddy current drum rotated at high speed, throwing out a beautiful parabola of copper granules, while aluminum granules fell closer and plastic was thrown the farthest. The three-color waterfalls of copper, aluminum, and plastic separated in a transparent casing, like a silent fireworks display and a firework of resource regeneration. The most crucial step is "venous blood collection" — precious metal enrichment. The equipment sent the copper powder into a vacuum distillation furnace, where lead and tin were first "persuaded to leave," leaving a black powder containing gold, silver, and palladium. This black powder was sent to the wet processing workshop, where it slowly dissolved in cyanide substitution solution and was then electrolytically extracted, eventually turning into a heavy gold-colored cake. An average old mobile phone board contains 0.034 grams of gold. A ton of boards can equal half a gold mine, but without the earth scars left by mining. The waste gas and wastewater at the end of the process are not discards. The activated carbon tower adsorbed acidic gases, and the RO membrane made heavy metal ions nowhere to hide. The concentrated solution was returned to the front end for further refining, and the water was recycled back to the cooling tower, like blood circulating within the equipment. At the exit of the workshop, a newly manufactured copper ingot glinted with a rose-colored sheen. It might become an electrical wire again, or the pulse of the next batch of mobile phones. The circuit board recycling equipment is not cold steel, but the metronome of urban mining. It strips the meaning of "waste" from the word, turns pollution into wealth, and rewrites the end as a new beginning. When the morning light penetrated the roof and shone on the stacked copper ingots, I seemed to hear countless old chips singing softly: We have never died, but just changed into another way to continue lighting up the world.
2026-02-16
2026-02-16
2026-02-16
2026-02-16
2026-02-16
2026-02-16
No. 15 Industrial Avenue, Industrial Park, Shicheng County, Jiangxi Province
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