Automatic Sorting of Small Electronic Device Scraps to Facilitate Tantalum Recycling

may be available in the future, this technique has not yet been completed as a sorter. The purpose of this study is to ascertain the applicability of our developed automatic sorting technique, which combines a laser 3D shape detection system and a weight meter, to the separa-Resources Abstract After precise dismantling of 49 scrap cellular phone models released between 1999 and 2007, it was found that the average number of tantalum condensers used in the cellular phone models decreased significantly after 2005. The automatic sorting technique which combines a weight meter with a laser three-dimensional shape-detection system was used to identify whether a scrap cellular phone was released before 2004 or after 2005. As the result, the automatic sorting technique was ade-quate for separating 191 different scrap cellular phone models into those two groups. In addition, automatic sorting of various other small electronic devices into three groups based on resource value was achieved with high accuracy.