#Industry ·2025-11-28
At 5 a.m., the city was still asleep, but the green-source recycling plant in the suburbs had already lit up with blue and white lights. The conveyor belt hummed to life, and the first batch of used mobile phone motherboards were poured into the feeding port, like a silent funeral and a grand rebirth. They would undergo seven rounds of baptism by the steel monster known as the "circuit board recycling equipment", ultimately returning the metal souls buried in resin to the earth. The first round was the "disassembling blade array". High-speed alloy blades, like surgeons, precisely cut through the heat-dissipating aluminum plates and fragile fiberglass boards, preventing precious metals from being wasted with plastic. The second round was the "low temperature crushing chamber", where liquid nitrogen at minus 40 degrees made solder brittle. After a single strike from a hammer-type crusher, components and substrates were instantly "separated from each other", yet hardly releasing toxic bromides. The third round's "magnetic separation wind tower" was even more miraculous. Neodymium-iron-boron rollers sucked iron and nickel into a black waterfall, while lightweight resin powder was blown to the other end, like snow falling backward in the night. The real climax lay in the "centrifugal re-selection" and "electrolytic gold capture". When particles became smaller than 0.1 mm, traditional sieves were powerless. Instead, the equipment allowed them to stratify by density in a high-speed trapezoidal trough: copper grains like red tide, tin flakes like silver fish, and the tiniest gold and palladium particles invisible to the naked eye. Subsequently, they were sent into a sealed electrolysis box, where under low-voltage DC, gold ions slowly migrated to the cathode, growing into thin, apricot-shaped flakes. Operator Zhou Zhou said that for every ton of waste boards processed, 200 grams of gold could be recovered, equivalent to mining 20 tons of high-grade gold ore, yet without the pollution of sodium cyanide and mercury. However advanced the technology, it cannot bypass the "human factor". Last year, the plant once mixed in a batch of counterfeit boards, with inferior glue coking at high temperatures and blocking the million-yuan sieve. On the night of the repair, Zhou Zhou crouched inside the machine, carefully brushing off the coking residue with a toothbrush until dawn. He said, "Equipment is iron, but human responsibility is steel. Without responsibility, even the most expensive blades will become dull." These words were posted at the entrance to the control room, like a simple prayer. At noon, sunlight penetrated the photovoltaic panels on the factory roof, just hitting the blue barrel at the discharge port. Inside the barrel, copper grains sparkled, and gold flakes lay quietly. They would be sent to the copper foil factory in Changsha and the jewelry workshop in Shenzhen, becoming new wires, new rings, or perhaps even a fast-charging plug for a mobile phone. The cycle of e-waste is completed by the roar of machines, and also quietly inscribed with a footnote in Zhou Zhou's rough palmprint: Recycling is not the end, but the starting point of the next heartbeat.
2025-11-28
2025-11-28
2025-11-28
2025-11-28
2025-11-28
2025-11-28
No. 15 Industrial Avenue, Industrial Park, Shicheng County, Jiangxi Province
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