#Industry ·2026-02-10
At 4 a.m., the dismantling park in Shijiao Town, Qingyuan City, Guangdong Province, is no longer shrouded in smoke and flames. In the past, workers would dump baskets of circuit boards into diesel tanks, ignite them, stir them, and scoop out the copper, while black smoke carrying dioxins wafted toward the rice fields at the village entrance. Today, a silver-gray "water-selecting dragon" lies dormant in the factory: conveyor belts feed the crushed boards into a sealed chamber, with only the gentle sound of water and faint electrical humming. This is China's first set of equipment for processing 50 tons of waste circuit boards daily through water selection. It uses water's gentleness to disassemble electronics with brute force. Water selection isn't as simple as "washing with water". The R&D team first conducts a "CT scan" on the circuit boards: X-rays identify areas containing precious metals, infrared technology detects brominated flame retardant layers, and the entire board is crushed into peanut-sized pieces. The core process is the "three-phase fluidized bed": high-pressure water jets and air bubbles create a suspension field, with metal particles sorted by density into different funnels — copper, aluminum, and tin sink into different-depth funnels, while resin powder floats into foam and is gently scraped away. The pH value is controlled at 70.2, and recycled water undergoes flocculation-ultrafiltration-RO three-stage treatment to achieve zero emissions. The copper surface shines like new, with a 99.7% purity of solder. Even non-metallic powder is compressed into dark gray profiles for use in municipal manhole covers. A single line saves 5,000 tons of coal and 200,000 trees annually. The most impressive details of the equipment lie in its design. Traditional crushing knives needed replacement every two weeks because fiberglass tangled them like steel wire; the new water-selecting line uses ceramic-coated roller knives with eight times longer lifespan. Even more ingenious is the "copper foil micro-vortex peeling": in a low-speed water flow of 0.3 meters/second, copper foil is gently peeled off like a satin ribbon, rather than being smashed, increasing copper recovery from 85% to 98%. Engineers say this isn't an invention, but rather learning from rivers — just as the Yellow River's nine bends leave gold in its riverbed. Some worry about costs. The factory calculated: Processing a ton of waste boards with an incinerator requires 1,700 yuan in electricity, diesel, and activated carbon, plus 200 yuan per ton for hazardous waste landfill fees. The water-selecting line consumes 1,400 yuan in electricity, materials, and reagents, but sells metals at a 15% higher price and resin powder for an additional 200 yuan, resulting in a net profit of 600 yuan per ton. More importantly, children's blood lead levels in the park have dropped by 40% over three years, and hospital asthma clinics have seen fewer patients — this "health account" can't be quantified but weighs heavily. On the day the equipment was exported, purchasing delegations from Indonesia, South Africa, and South Korea gathered in the debugging area, filming the "copper rice granules" tumbling in the water flow with their phones. The South African representative said their country's e-waste grows by 20% annually, but lacks smelting capacity. This modular equipment can be packed into 40-foot containers and deployed with just water and electricity, like building blocks. Chinese engineers pasted QR codes on the control boxes: remote diagnostics, cloud upgrades, and one-click language switching. Technology going global carries not just machines, but also the Eastern riddle of "green water and blue mountains are as precious as gold and silver". As evening falls, photovoltaic panels on the factory roof glow blue. Copper granules at the end of the water-selecting line are packed into transparent bags, like bags of sunset. They will return to copper foil factories, etched into fine lines in mobile phones again. Perhaps six months later, they'll return to this water-selecting dragon — the cycle of electronic products, no longer a game of pollution and evasion, but a graceful metamorphosis. Waste circuit boards aren't urban scars, but forgotten mines; water-selecting recovery equipment isn't cold steel, but a surgical knife to stop the earth's bleeding. When the sound of water replaces the crackling of flames, and the shine of copper illuminates children's eyes, we finally learn: true civilization is making garbage less dirty and the future breathable.
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No. 15 Industrial Avenue, Industrial Park, Shicheng County, Jiangxi Province
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