Rapid growth in consumption of electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) in worldwide leads to a drastic increase in waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). The continuous accumulation of these WEEEs can cause serious environmental problems. Thus, recycling of WEEE is expected to be a critical technology to solve environmental problems. Moreover, WEEE contains precious metals such as Au, Pd, Ag and Pt. Therefore, the recycling of WEEE is a very important issue for the environment, and at the same time, it will be of great economic benefit.

In this study, an arc smelting process using electronic scrap was performed and metal alloy was recovered. As a result of analysing the chemical composition of the recovered alloy, it was confirmed that it contained about 90 wt.% of Cu with a small amount of precious metals such as Pd and Au (< 1 wt.%). Besides that, Si, Fe and P were also included in the recovered metal alloy. In order to concentrate precious metals (Pd and Au) in the recovered alloy, an oxidative refining process was performed to remove Fe, Si and P through selective oxidation. Process conditions such as process temperature and time were diversified to improve the concentration rate of precious metals.

In addition, the concentration of precious metals was largely increased by changing the gas ratio of O₂ and N₂ gas and total gas flow rate as well.