ABB Robots in E-Waste Recycling: Scrap Yard to Microfactory

For most of the last century, recycling was hard manual work. During World War II, people dragged scrap to salvage depots like the one in Butte, Montana, where workers sorted the metal by hand. When old TVs and computers began piling up in the 1990s, most got shredded whole or pried open with hammers.

A scrap and salvage depot in Butte, Montana, in 1942. Photo: Russell Lee / Library of Congress (public domain)

Recycling plants later added conveyors and optical sensors, but people still stood at the belt picking out whatever the machines missed. It is dirty, repetitive work, and staff turnover is high. Electronics are harder still, since every maker fastens its screws, glass and circuit boards a little differently.

Workers pull items off a recycling sorting belt in Montgomery County, Maryland. Photo: U.S. EPA (public domain)

On September 14, Cyclic Materials opened an automated plant in Mesa, Arizona, that recovers rare earth magnets from scrapped products. AI-guided picking robots now work sorting lines at many recycling centers, and they have plenty to do: the world throws out about 62 million tonnes of electronics a year, and under a quarter of it is formally recycled.

A sorting robot picks construction waste off a belt at a SORTERA recycling center. Photo: Helvetia Environnement / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB robots are part of this. In Italy, Hiro Robotics built a disassembly line on ABB IRB 2600 and IRB 460 robots. One station unscrews an old monitor's back case, the next breaks the front bezel, and the last removes internal parts. It handles up to 90 monitors an hour, with people finishing the sorting.

An ABB robot unscrewing parts in Hiro Robotics' e-waste disassembly cell. Photo: ABB

In the US, ABB invested in the start-up Molg and works with it on robotic microfactories that take apart retired data center servers so their metals can be reused. For fast picks of light items off a moving belt, ABB's IRB 360 FlexPicker with PickMaster Twin vision software suits the job.

Two ABB robots on top of a Molg robotic microfactory. Photo: ABB

Most e-waste starts at home, as a phone in a kitchen drawer or a dead laptop in a closet. Apple's Daisy robot already takes old iPhones apart. If more products are designed to open easily, robots could strip down most household gadgets, and far fewer would end up in landfill.

ABB robots taking apart electronic hardware in Molg's microfactory. Photo: ABB

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