#Industry ·2026-02-28
At 2 a.m., the last street lamp in the city went out, while the "mountain of electronic waste" on the city outskirts quietly lit up with a faint glow. There, scrap circuit boards were shoveled into a silver-gray long line by a loader electronic waste water selection and recovery equipment. They were about to undergo a "water and electricity" baptism, transforming from the "environmental bombs" that everyone dislikes into recyclable "urban mines". This equipment is not noisy. The alloy knives of the crusher first crush the circuit boards into two-centimeter fragments at a speed of 600 revolutions per minute, and the static electricity and dust are instantly sucked away by negative pressure pipes; then, the fragments, like dancing black snowflakes, enter the core unit of water selection. The water flow is not tap water, but a closed-loop ionic liquid, with a specific gravity precisely adjusted to 1.18 just enough to make the copper particles sink while the epoxy resin floats up. In just three minutes, metals and non-metals are "separated", with a sorting purity of 97%, 15 percentage points higher than traditional pyrometallurgy, yet avoiding the risk of dioxins from incineration. At the end of the water selection tank, the copper particles are scooped up by conveyor belts like gold nuggets, glittering with a cold luster on their surfaces. They will be recast into red copper rods and then turned into wiring harnesses for new energy vehicles; on the other side, the lightweight resin powder is sucked into the granulator by negative pressure, and after adding a small amount of fiberglass, it is extruded and molded into gray anti-skid manhole covers. A scrap board thus completes the cycle of "chip - copper - manhole cover", with its life cycle extended by 20 times and carbon emissions reduced by 70%. Engineer Zhou Zhou calls this process a "river flowing against the current" allowing materials to return to their starting point without taking new mineral resources. However, the R&D journey was not smooth sailing. In the winter of 2018, the team failed 27 times in a row in the laboratory: if the water flow was too fast, the metals would carry the resin; if it was too slow, the non-metals would mix into the copper powder. At 11 p.m., Li Xiaojie, who was in charge of fluid mechanics, stared at the rolling particles in the high-speed camera and suddenly thought of the "fish school effect". Adding a set of pulsed airflow to the water tank made the water flow like a fish school, with laminar and turbulent zones alternating, allowing light and heavy particles to find their place. At 4 a.m., when the purity figure jumped to 96.8%, cheers broke out in the whole floor in a hushed voice. At that moment, they knew they had not only overcome the parameters, but also made "electronic waste" gain dignity for the first time in China. On the day the equipment was exported overseas, the Portuguese client made the first recycled copper ingot into a commemorative medal, engraved with "FROM WASTE TO WONDER". Zhou Zhou pinned it to his work clothes pocket, like a new starting point. He said: "The circuit board was originally the appendix of the city. We made it grow into a second heart." Now, this silver-gray long line has been sailing in 23 factories on five continents, extracting 4,000 tons of copper, 1,000 tons of aluminum, and 200 kilograms of gold from 10,000 tons of waste boards each year, equivalent to reducing the mining of 120,000 tons of ore. More importantly, it has made the word "recycling" no longer synonymous with low-end and pollution, but become the most eye-catching badge in the green industry chain. As night falls, the equipment is still humming softly, like an unceasing pulse. Those once discarded lines are being reconnected in the water; those forgotten resources are being reactivated in the electrodes of human wisdom. The electronic waste water selection and recovery equipment tells us: so-called garbage is just a treasure placed in the wrong place; and the real circular economy begins when we are willing to bend over and gently pick up the treasure.
2026-02-28
2026-02-28
2026-02-28
2026-02-28
2026-02-28
2026-02-28
No. 15 Industrial Avenue, Industrial Park, Shicheng County, Jiangxi Province
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