Nowadays the electronics industry is the leading sector in developing new technologies. These new technologies lead to cheaper products increasing the consumption. The lifetime of such products is relatively short and soon it becomes waste, known as electronic waste. Cell phone is a common electronic waste. This waste represents an interesting raw material, because it contains large amount of base metals, considerable amount of valuable metals and also those dangerous. In this work, the electronic waste was submitted to mechanical processing: initially the devices were separated into two categories (less 2001,more 2002) and disassembled manually. The printed circuit boards were milled below 1 mm and then submitted to density and magnetic separation processes. The fractions obtained during the mechanical processing were characterized by chemical analysis. Using the mechanical processing was possible to obtain metal fractions of 80 wt per cent. A preliminary study to recover silver using hydrometallurgical processes was carried out. The concentrated material mechanically obtained was leached with nitric acid. Then the silver was recovered from the leached solution by cementation process. The silver cementation with copper was feasible; the precipitate was rich in silver and leachate in copper. A leaching test was carried out to determine if a waste needs to be managed as a hazardous; so that, cell phone waste must be considered hazardous residue because the lead concentration was above the limit established by Brazilian Standards.