Green Route for Beneficiation of Metallic Materials from Electronic Waste for Selective Reduction of CO2

The effective disposal of ever-increasing electronic waste (e-waste) is one of the grand challenges for the scientific and technological community today. As e-waste has exponentially been increasing the burden on our environment with long-term effects on the ecosystem, the need for finding sustainable means to recover, reuse, and recycle the materials available in the e-waste is much sought after in the present time. In this background, we demonstrate an easily scalable green route for the beneficiation and effective usage of metallic materials from the e-waste using cryo-temperature grinding with the primary objective of retrieving the near-full metallic residue from e-waste by an energy-efficient and eco-friendly approach. The metallic nanoparticles thus obtained are subsequently utilized for the selective reduction of CO2 into different gaseous products via the electrochemical route, leading to the evolution of CH4, H2, and CO as major gaseous products at neutral pH and CO as the major product at basic pH. In a nutshell, the current approach can provide useful means for achieving major metallic residue from the e-waste, which can further be utilized for green energy production in an eco-friendly manner, making the process sustainable.