There are two main approaches to recycling end-of-life electronics; demanufacturing and shredding. Demanufacturing involves manually dismantling the electronics in order to extract the raw materials that are found within the electronics. This process is done by trained technicians and yields more components that can be given a new life in secondary markets. Shredding involves electronics that are fed in to large industrial shredders. This process allows recyclers to recover the maximum value from the recyclable materials in the electronics.
To see what happens to the harvested materials from the demanufacturing process please click on the link below. You might be surprised by the similarities across different types of electronics. This graphic illustrates the second lives of many of the raw materials from recycled electronics.
