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The behavior of impurity elements during a copper recovery process from waste printed circuit board (PCB) using ammonia–ammonium sulfate and chloride systems are examined and the performance of these two systems are compared. Leaching of PCB was carried out by solutions containing copper(II) ammine complexes as the oxidizing agent. The copper was selectively dissolved but the leach solution also contained zinc (∼1 g/L), lead and manganese (∼0.1 g/L), in addition to 40–50 g/L copper. The solution was then purified by solvent extraction using LIX 26 (alkyl substituted 8-hydroxy-quinoline) which typically extracted >95% of the impurity elements with a few exceptions. The selectivity in the leaching and purification steps was higher in the sulfate system than that in the chloride system. Finally, copper was recovered from the solution by electro-deposition with a low power consumption of 1300 and 500 …