Critical
metals are significantly important in the preparation
of high-tech materials associated with applications on, e.g., renewable
energy, sustainable materials engineering and cleaner production.
This importance together with supply risk to a substantial extent
within the European Union (EU) has pushed their recovery from waste
being highlighted. Electronic waste, usually from end-of-life electronic
products, is a notable secondary resource for this purpose because
of its distinctive features. A range of critical metals, including
rare-earth metals, indium, cobalt and valuable metals, such as copper,
silver and gold, are possibly recovered from electronic waste. On
top of the current practices of electronic waste recycling, it requires
innovations on technology and breakthroughs on process design in order
to promote critical metal recovery or electronic waste treatment (in
general) to be green and sustainable. Significant potentials are more
and more noticed from hydrochemistry (metallurgy) technologies (processes)
that contribute to this development because of its flexibility, relatively
high recovery rate and extraction selectivity of critical metals,
and possibilities of eliminating secondary waste. In this review,
critical evaluation is carried out on the aspects of (1) understanding
the features of different hydrochemistry processes for recycling of
(critical) metals from electronic waste; (2) identifying the difficulties
for a process to be implemented into industrial application which
still originate from the high complexity of electronic waste and the
secondary waste generation, e.g., wastewater; (3) defining circulability
of metals to be recovered and recognizing their potentials to zero
waste scheme. According to the evaluation, sustainable even zero waste
processing is expected to be achieved for electronic waste treatment
in the long term that it is preferred to reduce or prevent the generation
of electronic waste and improve material efficiency from the whole
life cycle of electronic products.