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.