Waste Cable Recycling

Why do we recycle waste cables?

A large number of wires and cables are discarded every year, and the wires are usually derived from home wiring, scrap cars, waste electrical appliances, electronic products and communication cables, etc. Waste cable recycling is a very necessary work to do.

The conductors commonly used in various cables are copper core wires or aluminum core wires. In view of the situation that copper and aluminum resources tend to decrease, copper is probably the mineral resource that has been exhausted early on the earth. Therefore, it is very necessary for the recycling of wires ——both for resource regeneration, but also for economic return.

Methods of waste cable recycling

1. Incineration method:

This method is a more traditional method, which uses the combustible nature of the wire sheath to directly burn waste wires and cables, and then recover the copper inside. Although this method is simple, copper is severely oxidized during the incineration process. What’s more, the plastic coating on the wire and cable is usually made of polyethylene or polyvinyl chloride, and the burning of these materials not only wastes resources, but also causes serious environmental pollution, so it is banned in many countries.

2. Freezing method:

It uses liquid nitrogen as a refrigerant, so that waste wires and cables are frozen at ultra-low temperature and become brittle, and then broken and shaken to separate plastic and copper. This method has high cost, is difficult to operate on a large scale, and has not been put into actual production.

3. Physical peeling method:

This method is to use manual or machine to strip the insulation layer of the wire and cable, so as to recycle the scrap wires. Although this method hardly causes any pollution to the environment, its disadvantages are also obvious:

• Manual operation, low efficiency
• It is only suitable for single-strand square wires and cable wires. And obviously it’s difficult to handle thin wires such as automobile wires, home wires, network wires, and mixed electronic wires.

4. Crushing and separating method:

The equipments used in this method is the copper cable granulator that we often refer to. Compared with wire stripping machine, its output capacity is higher, which greatly reduces the labor intensity.

The scrap wires are chopped into small pieces, and then the copper and plastic are separated by water washing or airflow differentiation and electrostatic separation. This method has a wide range of applications, not only can process thick square wires and cables, but also can process thin wires such as automobile wire, motorcycle wire, electric vehicle wire, network wire, communication wire, and other raw materials.

Gomine Machinery has rich experience in e waste recycling field, contact us freely if you need more information about our waste cable recycling machine.