Technological development has led to increasing quantities of waste electrical and electronic equipment. At the same time, the search for more efficient uses of energy is an urgent current issue. Both problems have relations to LED bulbs. The presence of hazardous and valuable materials in these bulbs makes their recycling essential. However, due to the many different parts that compose an LED bulb, the separation of LEDs from the bulbs is difficult, but is crucial for proper recycling. This work describes a recycling process for LED bulbs solely using mechanical processing. Firstly, the LED bulbs were dismantled and their components were characterized in terms of their weight and by DSC and SEM/EDS analyses. Then, operations including comminution, sieving, electrostatic separation, magnetic separation, and gravity separation were applied to separate the LED bulb components, according to their characteristics. The operations were adapted in order to achieve the maximum possible separation of the components. A mechanical processing flowchart was proposed for LED bulb recycling. Characterization of LED bulbs revealed the presence of polymers and valuable and/or hazardous materials including copper, silver, and lead. The results showed separation efficiencies in the range 98-100% for many components (polymeric cover, metallic housing, Edison screw, PCB, and heat sink with LEDs). A simplified economic analysis of the recycling process showed it to be feasible, with estimated profit of US$ 639.82/ton of processed LED bulbs. The results indicated that the proposed mechanical processing was highly effective for the recovery of materials at high purity from LED bulbs.

技术的发展导致废旧电气和电子设备数量的增加。同时，寻求更有效地利用能源是当前的紧迫问题。这两个问题都与LED灯泡有关。这些灯泡中含有危险和有价值的材料，因此必须进行回收。但是，由于组成LED灯泡的部件很多，因此很难将LED与灯泡分开，这对于正确的回收利用至关重要。这项工作描述了仅使用机械处理的LED灯泡的回收过程。首先，拆卸LED灯泡，并通过重量，DSC和SEM / EDS分析对其组件进行表征。然后进行粉碎，筛分，静电分离，磁力分离，根据其特性，使用重力分离和重力分离来分离LED灯泡组件。调整操作以实现组件的最大可能分离。提出了用于LED灯泡回收的机械处理流程图。LED灯泡的特性表明存在聚合物以及包括铜，银和铅在内的有价值的和/或有害的材料。结果表明，许多组件（聚合物盖，金属外壳，爱迪生螺钉，PCB和带LED的散热器）的分离效率在98-100％的范围内。对回收过程进行的简化经济分析表明它是可行的，估计的加工LED灯泡利润为639.82 / t。