The UK's Royal Mint has set up an industrial plant to extract gold from discarded circuit boards.
Located at a site in south Wales, the 3,700 square metre facility uses chemistry from Canadian clean tech company Excir, extracting gold from printed circuit boards (PCBs) found in everyday items, such as TVs, laptops and mobile phones, in minutes.
The factory has scaled the innovative technology from laboratory to an industrial level for the first time and has the capacity to process up to 4,000 tonnes of PCBs from e-waste every year.
At the plant, circuit boards are heated up and 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.
Initial use of the technology has already produced gold with a purity of 999.9, and when fully scaled up, the process has potential to also recover palladium, silver and copper.
Recovered gold is already being used in the luxury jewellery collection, 886 by The Royal Mint.
According to the United Nations’ Global E-waste Monitor, the generation of worldwide e-waste is rising by 2.6 million tonnes every year. A record 62 million tonnes of e-waste was produced in 2022, up 82% from 2010.
Anne Jessopp, chief executive at The Royal Mint, says: “The Royal Mint is transforming for the future, and the opening of our Precious Metals Recovery factory marks a pivotal step in our journey.
“We are not only preserving finite precious metals for future generations, but we are also preserving the expert craftmanship The Royal Mint is famous for by creating new jobs and reskilling opportunities for our employees."
The decline of cash use globally has been a catalyst for change at The Royal Mint, spurring innovation and diversification. Earlier this year, The Royal Mint announced the closure of its Overseas Currency division. All 230 staff have been offered roles in new and growing business areas including the Precious Metals Recovery factory.