Value Recovery from Waste Liquid Crystal Display Glass Cullet through Leaching: Understanding the Correlation between Indium Leaching Behavior and Cullet Piece Size

For hydrometallurgical recovery of indium from glass cullet after dismantling a waste liquid crystal display (LCD), leaching is the rudimentary stage. Though size reduction of the cullet pieces adds convenience for recycling, from an efficiency and cost-effectiveness perspective regarding leaching process development, determining the proper cullet piece size is essential. Hence, in this study, leaching efficiency of indium as a function of cullet piece size was investigated, wherein the proper mechanical classification of crushed glass cullet could be addressed. The optimum conditions of 5 M mineral acid as the lixiviant, pulp density of 500 g/L, temperature of 75 °C, agitation speed of 500 rpm, 2 h process time were kept constant for the leaching studies. It was concluded that the size of the waste LCD cullet inversely affected the leaching efficiency of indium. For efficient leaching, a smaller cullet size is recommended; hence, waste LCD should be crushed to pieces 1 mm or smaller. Indium leaching behavior comparison using HCl, HNO₃, H₂SO₄ revealed that all three mineral acids had similar leaching efficiencies. The reported process provides the missing link between physical dismantling and chemical processing for indium recovery via techno-economical-sustainable process development.