Stripping circuit boards - safe or hazardous?

Hey everyone, I was recently reminded of the empeg community and I'm glad to see you're all still here! I'm curious to bounce an idea off your collective mind:

How safe or hazardous is it to strip soldered components off circuit boards?

I'm considering a project where I strip circuit boards and make them into useful items like 3-ring binders and boxes. I'm assuming the preparation will include using a heat gun to melt the components solder and remove them, sand the stripped boards to expose the shiny copper traces, than coat them with acrylic so they're safe for extensive handling.

But how safe or hazardous is it for me to strip off the components? Will the heated solder produce toxic vapors? Might the molten solder carry lead and other harmful chemicals? And when I sand the boards, will I need to collect all the dust to avoid spreading the toxins?

The best solution seems to build a sealed enclosure in which to strip the boards, trapping the vapors, solder and dust (the unwanted slag). I would hope it's possible to send this slag to an electronics recycler so they can feed it into their shredding, melting and separating processes like they'd do with a complete circuit board. Still, the stripping process seems very hard, especially at scale.

Thanks for any input you may have.

Are you planning to market these lead covered binders?

Thanks for watching out for me. Yes, I plan to sell "lead covered binders" after making them safe for excessive handling. Other people do it, so there must be a way. I have a circuit board binder which was purchased over 15 years ago and handling it for two years hasn't killed me. Then again, I think it was specifically manufactured to be a binder, not a recycled circuit board.

The final step is to coat the stripped boards in arcylic, lacquer or some other strong, clear coating. This will both prevent human hands from being exposed to chemicals in the board, but also preserve the shiny surface of the board.

The harder part is removing the components from the board in a way that's both safe for me and for the environment. I wish I could buy recycled boards already stripped. There must be a way...

You might be able to find boards that were never stuffed, I seem to run across those occasionally.

I find that if you do enough parts removal on a board, inevitably traces come off and it's a mess.

Doesn't the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 essentially make illegal the production of anything with lead in it?

If you're planning on production, why not just have new lead-free boards made? I'm sure stripping populated boards will take hours, unless it's 100% surface mount and you have a machine to do the the stripping.

I'm pretty sure that the (vast) majority of people making things out of circuit boards are using boards that have never been populated. You can see a lot of this stuff on Etsy for example. Reclaiming boards might be fine for low-volume, including special order production, but I'd think it prohibitively expensive otherwise.

I have no idea where these Etsy folk get their boards, wether they're overstock, failed designs or as Larry suggested, made for that purpose. A number of them have to be old stock since they look and are advertised to be "vintage."

It might be worth contacting some recyclers to find out if you can buy unpopulated boards. Seems a lot of places don't pay when taking unpopulated boards due to low quantity metal reclamation. So maybe this is an avenue to obtain such boards after all.

The items I've seen that were made from circuit cards - all appeared to be new unsoldered boards. I always assumed they were rejects. It being cheaper to make new ones than fix bad.

Thanks for the tips! I never thought of finding unwanted unpopulated boards. That achieves my goal of recycling something that's otherwise useless. Hopefully, as you suggest, recyclers want to offload them cheap or free since they have less precious metal contents than populated boards.

I was also hoping to use recent boards which are RoHS compliant, which my preliminary reading indicates are free from highly hazardous materials.

Yeah, Etsy sellers are always completely honest about their items' provenance.

Bitt, not really relevant unless you mean to say that the products aren't necessarily made by the folks doing the selling. Which can be true in some cases. But my mention of Etsy has nothing to do with the product, it was just an example of one place where I've recently seen products using vintage-looking PCBs.

As always, buyer beware.

I know a guy who owns a big electronics recycling outfit in the DC area. He pulls the circuit boards for anything that can't be reused and they get sent to other outfits who strip them for whatever precious metals they contain. I could find the name of whatever company that is, and if they don't ruin the boards they use, maybe they would ship you a box of them? I'm sure they normally throw them out afterwards because they're worthless...

I think you'd be better off contacting the board mfgs and getting the unpopulated rejects. When I worked with Compeq in Taiwan, they tossed a few large boards a day that failed QC.

Thanks Matt, I'd like to get the name of the company and/or your contact. I'm up in NJ so shipping the boards would be straightforward.

I'm holding only a little hope, though, because what I've read indicates that boards are not stripped, but shredded. The shreds are then melted, boiled, or otherwise separated into their base metals. You're right, the PCBs themselves are the most bulky and entirely wasted part of the process.

Larry, that's a great idea, so I'll try to track down failed, unpopulated boards. I doubt ASUS or whomever would talk to me, but perhaps there are large recyclers that they work with who receive the clean boards. They must be out there somewhere.

Thanks again!

Look for a custom or low-medium volume local PCB manufacturer. when they do contract production runs they will sometimes have out of specification units that get directed towards recycling or trashed.

If they know what you are looking for and you can be flexible with time or size of the boards then they may be able to set some aside when it happens.

Yeah, you have to track down the board manufacturer (note I said I worked at Compeq, not Compaq). Compeq is one of the high end board mfgs in Taiwan. You need a place doing semi-cutting edge densities, so they'll have some failures. I think the PCB houses left here in the US are so conservative that they have no waste boards.

They are indeed shredded with components in place and then a series of nasty processes with even nastier chemicals and acids is used to extract the good stuff.

Most of the PCBs that we receive in are panelised, that means that there are multiple PCBs per panel and we just break them out at the end, bad boards are marked (scored) in the panels by the PCB manufacturer so we don't Mount them.

Obviously PCBs which aren't panelised but fail bare board test never make it to us, but you're unlikely to be able to get this "scrap" from a PCB manufacturer as its not their ip and we would certainly be pissed if a pcb manufacturer was giving away our boards to third parties - faulty or not.

Adrian

Screw safety, I'd be concerned with the sheer amount of manual labor required. The only time I'd sign up for that amount of work is if I wanted to save the component or save the board, for their primary original intended function.

It's not as simple as heating up the board and then the components fall off. It's usually quite fiddly, depending on the design.

I contacted my recycler guy, and he recommended against going after the recyclers and to go after the unpopulated boards, as others have suggested here. He gave, as an example, this link.

I don't know if those specific ones are big enough for a notebook-sized project, but it's a start...

Sure it is, at least with all of the boards I've ever tried this with.

Older through-hole boards, no, of course not. But modern-ish (empeg era and beyond) SMT boards, yeah the components do just drop off under the blast of a heat gun. A few larger components don't, but those are very few.

And if a few larger parts stay on that would be ok it would add visual interest.

Why not leave all the parts on then, and encapsulate in casting resin?

Also, the age of the PDP-11 and it's ilk is long gone, finding boards big enough to be binder covers in quantity might be problematic these days.