Thermal Conditioning of Metals and EoL-Products for Improved Recycling Efficiency

Dear Colleagues,

Today’s recycling processes for metals often meet challenges, especially with regard to the complex composition of modern end-of-life products, the low concentration of valuable components/metals, and the presence of hazardous substances. Organics are widely used on a daily basis for goods manufacturing in parts such as casings, electrolytes, separators, structural materials or sealings, limiting the feed speed into smelting operations or hindering the interaction of chemicals due to the hydrophobic character of these materials. This also accounts for production scrap on the way toward finished goods, such as coated metal sheets/foils or semi-finished composites. The consequences are reduced efficiencies in the production lines and new components in waste streams. Processes surviving in the circular economy, however, must ensure high recovery rates, robustness, and safety as well as flexibility, process simplification of the subsequent steps, and, finally, waste reduction. Alternatives such as landfill, municipal waste incineration or direct-to-metallurgy routes often do not meet these requirements, and heavy and valuable metal losses occur. A solution is the integration of prior thermal pre-treatment of the materials, which cover the areas of pyrolysis, thermolysis, and controlled dedicated incineration. The scientific basis of this is rather poor, and such implementation has not happened so far on a broad level, but fortunately, an increasing amount of research centers in the world have it on their agenda. Moreover, many processing industries plan to integrate those techniques for future activities as a necessary tool for efficient recycling. This Special Issue addresses the newest research in the field of thermal pre-treatment of circular materials. Examples are end of life lithium-ion batteries (LIB), used beverage cans (UBC), and waste of electric and electronic equipment such as printed circuit boards (PCBs), mobile phones or shredder light fractions (SLF) from different mechanical pre-treatment operations.

With this call for papers, we would like to encourage all international scientists in this interesting field of research to contribute to this Special Issue and create a worldwide recognized book.

Prof. Dr. Bernd Friedrich
Dr. Martina Petranikova
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• metal recycling
• circular economy
• organic waste
• thermal treatment
• pyrolysis