UK’s coin manufacturer, the Royal Mint, has opened an electronic waste extraction factory in South Wales.
According to the company, a pioneering new factory extracting gold from electronic circuit boards will reduce reliance on traditional mining
It also said the company will be processing up to 4,000 tonnes of printed circuit boards from e-waste every year.
On its property in Llantrisant, Wales, the business constructed a sizable industrial facility to extract the valuable metal from used circuit boards.
Originally, the gold is being used to make jewelry, but eventually, it will be turned into commemorative coins.
The UN estimates that 62 million tonnes of e-waste—which includes anything from outdated computers and phones to TVs—were thrown away in 2022. E-waste is a rapidly expanding issue.
Anne Jessopp, Royal Mint chief executive, said it is “transforming for the future” and the opening of its Precious Metals Recovery factory “marks a pivotal step in our journey”.
As well as recycling the circuit boards it receives, the Royal Mint is also working towards receiving the entire items – computers, mobile phones, server equipment – so it can be involved in the full process.
It comes as a recent UN report says e-waste is rising five times faster than e-waste recycling – with an 82% jump on 2010 to a record 62 million tonnes in 2022.
Its latest report estimates that the mountain of discarded tech is set to increase by about a third by 2030.
At the Royal Mint plant, piles of circuit boards are being fed into the new facility.
First, they are heated to remove their various components. Then the array of detached coils, capacitors, pins and transistors are sieved, sorted, sliced and diced as they move along a conveyor belt.
Anything with gold in it is set aside.
On average, one tonne of circuit boards produces 165gm of gold, equating to around £9,000.
The silver and gold are used by the official maker of British coins to produce jewellery and commemorative coins.
The non-precious metal that is recovered, such as copper, tin, steel, aluminium, is sent to other companies as a raw material to turn them into products such as sheets, bars and rods to manufacture new products.
