Issue 4, 2022

Recovery of copper, zinc and lead from photovoltaic panel residue

Abstract

The increase in photovoltaic panel installations in Europe will generate vast amounts of waste in the near future. Therefore, it is important to develop new technologies that allow the recycling of end-of-life photovoltaic panels. This material can serve as a secondary resource, not only for precious metals (e.g. silver), but also for base metals. In this work, the extraction and recovery of the base metals copper, zinc and lead from a copper-rich photovoltaic panel residue was investigated. The material was first leached at 80 °C under microwave irradiation with a mixture of hydrochloric acid, sodium chloride and hydrogen peroxide solutions. Based on the Box–Behnken factorial design optimization, it was possible to extract 81.2% of Cu, 96.4% of Zn and 77.6% of Pb, under the following leaching conditions: [HCl] = 0.5 mol L−1, [NaCl] = 200 g L−1, [H2O2] = 7.5 wt% and t = 60 min. Cementation with iron powder at a 1.2 iron-to-copper stoichiometric ratio allowed the recovery of copper nearly quantitatively (99.8%) as a copper–iron sediment. The gas–liquid separation technique of ion flotation was employed to separate lead and zinc from the dilute copper-free leachate. Cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB), a cationic surfactant, selectively recovered lead (99.4%) over zinc as lead(II) tetrachloro cetyltrimethylammonium colloid, after eight ion flotation stages and [CTAB]total = 7.2 mmol L−1. The zinc that remained in the solution after the ion flotation step was recovered by precipitation and by adding sodium sulfide at 110% of the stoichiometric amount after removing iron as ferric hydroxide by slowly raising the pH to 3.7.

Graphical abstract: Recovery of copper, zinc and lead from photovoltaic panel residue

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
22 dec 2021
Accepted
11 jan 2022
First published
17 jan 2022
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

RSC Adv., 2022,12, 2351-2360

Recovery of copper, zinc and lead from photovoltaic panel residue

P. Xanthopoulos, S. Bevandić, J. Spooren, K. Binnemans and F. Kukurugya, RSC Adv., 2022, 12, 2351 DOI: 10.1039/D1RA09268E

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements