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Nowadays Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) are widely utilized. They are applied as backlighting in Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD) and TV sets or as lighting equipments in homes, cars, instruments and street-lightning. End of life equipments are containing more and more LEDs. The recovery of valuable materials -such as Ga, Au, Cu etc. -from the LEDs is essential for the creating the circular economy. First task is the development of a proper recycling technology. Most of the researchers propose fully chemical or thermal-chemical pathway for the recycling of LEDs.In the meantime our approach based on the thorough investigation of the structure and composition of LEDs, and shown in this paper, is the combination of mechanical and chemical techniques in order to recover more valuable products, as well as to facilitate the mass transfer. Our laboratory scale experiments are introduced, the final aim of which is Ga recovery in accordance with our above approach. It was experimentally proved that the LED chips contain Ga and can be recovered by mechanical processes along with copper-product. Ga is presented on the surface of the chips in GaN form. Mechano-chemical activation in high energy density stirred medium mill and the following acidic leaching resulted in the enrichment of 99.52% of gallium in the pregnant solution.

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Landfill mining is a prospective tool for the recycling of valuable materials (waste-to-material) and secondary fuel (waste-to-energy) from old, therefore more or less stabilised municipal solid waste landfills. The main target of Horizon 2020 ‘SMARTGROUND’ R&D was improving the availability and accessibility of data and information from both urban landfills and mining dumps through a set of activities to integrate all the data – from existing sources and new information retrieved with time progress – in a single EU database. Concerning urban landfills, a new sampling protocol was designed on the basis of the current Hungarian national municipal solid waste analysis standards, optimised for landfill mining. This protocol was then applied in a sampling campaign on a municipal solid waste landfill in Debrecen, Hungary. The composition and parameters of the landfilled materials were measured as a 12-year timescale. The total wet and dry mass of the valuable components possible for utilisation was estimated.

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