#Industry ·2026-02-27
At 4 a.m., the last street lamp in the city went out, and a van quietly drove into the Kunshan Resource Recycling Industrial Park. The doors opened, and what was unloaded were not garbage, but plastic crates labeled as "waste circuit boards". They had once been regarded as "e-waste", but now they were like soldiers awaiting inspection, about to be given new life by a three-meter-high "circuit board recycling equipment". The equipment's outer shell was coated with light blue paint, looking like a giant piano from a distance. The conveyor belt fed the circuit boards into the "mouth". The first "teeth" were double-shaft shredders, which instantly crushed graphics cards, memory chips, copper foil, and resin into fragments the size of a fingernail. The dust was sucked away by negative pressure pipes, and the odor was "swallowed" by activated carbon towers, so there was no trace of burnt plastic in the workshop. The fragments continued forward into the 70-degree low-temperature desoldering furnace. Lead-free solder, like awakened silver fish, flowed down the inclined chute into collection buckets, clattering as the precious metals landed. The real climax was in the electrostatic sorting area. High-voltage electrodes charged the crushed particles with different electrical charges. Copper particles were "attracted" to the positive electrode, while resin powder was "pushed" toward the negative electrode, like a silent tug-of-war. The copper's purity reached 99.5%, allowing it to be sent directly to the smelter; the resin powder was compressed into dark brown boards, becoming the backs of park benches. The LED screen at the end of the equipment flashed in real time: Today, 3.2 tons of circuit boards were processed, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 5.7 tons, equivalent to planting 312 fir trees. Operator Zhou put the copper particles into ton bags and picked up a thumb-sized green circuit board with the words "Huawei" still on it. He smiled and said, "Chips can be remanufactured, and copper wire can be recycled into new wires. This board might one day return to our phones in another form." His words reminded me of the law of "matter is indestructible". Cities are not the end of mineral deposits, but the starting point of the next batch of mineral deposits. At sunset, the van started up again, this time loaded with rose-gold-shimmering copper bricks. They would head to the copper foil factory in Luoyang, where they would be rolled into 6-micron-thick foil and become the negative electrode carrier for certain power batteries. The circuit board recycling equipment was like a silent alchemist, erasing the word "waste" from the dictionary and allowing electricity to continue flowing in a new circuit. Perhaps the green revolution is not far away. It's hidden in the low hum of the machine, in the clear clatter of colliding copper particles, and in the moment when we redefine the word "waste".
2026-02-27
2026-02-27
2026-02-27
2026-02-27
2026-02-27
2026-02-27
No. 15 Industrial Avenue, Industrial Park, Shicheng County, Jiangxi Province
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