Royal Mint factory in South Wales to recover e-waste gold
Pioneering new facility aims to process 4,000 tonnes of scrap circuit boards each year
The Royal Mint has opened a multimillion-pound new factory on a 35-acre site in Llantrisant, South Wales, that will extract gold from discarded electronic waste including circuit boards used in phones, laptops and TVs. The aim is to produce hundreds of kgs of gold that can then be reused in the mint’s luxury, ‘886’ jewellery range.
Photo courtesy of The Royal Mint/PA
The initiative is part of wider efforts to diversify the Royal Mint’s business, given the decline in cash use as we increasingly use digital payments.
The extraction process involves two stages. First, a specialised plant sorts the circuit boards. Those containing fragments of gold are then spun in a drum a little like a washing machine, while washed in an acid that can dissolve gold. This makes uses patented new chemistry developed by the Canadian clean tech firm Excir.
Recycling e-waste isn’t new: we’ve reported before on efforts across Europe to recover ‘black mass’, the shredded remains of old lithium-ion batteries that contain metals such as copper and lithium vitally needed in producing new batteries.
But what makes the Royal Mint’s new factory so pioneering is that the recovery process is conducted at ambient temperatures, meaning that gold is recovered using much less heat and energy than other extraction methods. The gold is dissolved in about four minutes.
In post-processing, plastic elements of the circuit boards are separated out so that they can also be recycled.
Each tonne of circuit boards processed in this way is expected to produce some 165gm of gold, which is worth about £9,000. Using this recovered gold in the luxury jewellery range has the potential to maximise profits – which is good news for the UK taxpayer. The Royal Mint is 100% owned by the UK Treasury and each year it pays a dividend to the government. Remaining profits are then reinvested.
Sean Millard, Chief Growth Office at the Royal Mint, says: ‘The United Kingdom is the second largest contributor, per capita, of electronic waste. Globally, the world produces an estimated 50m tonnes of electronic waste every year, which is set to grow to 82m tonnes by 2030 – resulting in electronic waste being one of the fastest-growing waste streams in the world.
‘This exciting new solution tackles the challenge of electronic waste in a more sustainable way, helping to lower our carbon footprint. Additionally, it reduces our reliance on mined materials, demonstrating the positive impact of a more circular economy as we transform the way we work fpr a more sustainable future.’
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