#Industry ·2026-03-20
At 2 a.m., the dismantling workshops in Guiyu, Guangdong, were still brightly lit. Workers dumped baskets of used mobile phone boards into a high-temperature acid bath, and the pungent white smoke instantly engulfed the starry sky. This scene was once the daily routine of China's "e-waste capital". Today, however, it's the same trucks of circuit boards being sent into fully enclosed blue factories, without open flames or acid fumes, only the sound of trickling water. There, a "complete set of water-based recycling equipment for used circuit boards" is quietly operating, allowing every piece of waste board to undergo a "rebirth" in clear water. The equipment looks like a "water-based highway": first, the boards are shredded into pea-sized particles by two-stage shredders; then they are cleaned in a scrubbing tower to remove surface dust; next, they enter the re-selection flotation chamber, where copper, tin, gold, and silver separate into different "outlets" under the precise control of water flow and bubbles, like obedient fish. Finally, a belt filter press compresses the residual resin powder into dry cakes, and the water is recycled through a microfiltration-reverse osmosis system, with a recycling rate of up to 96%. The entire process only requires three operators to oversee, and can "process" two tons of waste boards per hour, with a copper recovery rate exceeding 98%, far higher than the 85% of traditional acid-washing processes, and the concentration of heavy metal ions in the effluent is less than one-tenth of the national emission limits. "E-waste is a misplaced mine." Li Bo, the head of the R&D team, pointed to the monitoring screen and said. On the screen, a palm-sized waste board was being broken down into quantifiable data: 12.5 grams of copper, 0.18 grams of gold, 0.35 grams of silver, and 0.02 grams of palladium... At current market prices, one ton of waste boards can extract more than 30,000 yuan worth of metals, and the water-based process eliminates the pollution associated with this "mine". In the past, acid-washing one ton of waste boards produced eight tons of acidic waste liquid and two tons of etching sludge; today, the water-based line only adds 0.15 tons of resin powder, and after modification, it can be used to make fire-retardant building formwork, truly making the most of every resource. More excitingly, the core component of the equipment, the "Multiphase Flotation Column", uses 3D-printed gradient pore nozzles with a bubble diameter stabilized at 0.2 mm, equivalent to one-third the thickness of a human hair, allowing even the finest gold particles to "float" to the surface. This technology was once monopolized by foreign companies, with a single nozzle priced at 200,000 yuan. After more than 400 failures, Li Bo's team finally printed domestically produced nozzles with a lifespan of over 8,000 hours using ceramic-metal composite powder, reducing the cost to 20,000 yuan and breaking the "bottleneck" dilemma. Last year, the equipment was exported to Germany and South Korea, achieving a "zero breakthrough" in the reverse export of Chinese environmental protection equipment to developed countries. From "fire-based acid-washing" to "water-based gold mining", the complete set of water-based recycling equipment for used circuit boards has completed China's technological iteration in e-waste processing over the past ten years. It tells us: environmental protection is not a burden on development, but a springboard for industrial upgrading; circular economy is not just a slogan, but a science with accuracy down to the second decimal point. As more "water-based mines" spread across China, and the term "e-waste" gradually fades from the dictionary, we will eventually usher in a tomorrow of infinite resources and pristine mountains and rivers.
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No. 15 Industrial Avenue, Industrial Park, Shicheng County, Jiangxi Province
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