Happy Eco News How the Royal Mint is Creating Gold Coins from E-Waste
Reading Time: 2 minutesHow the Royal Mint is creating gold coins from e-waste
The Royal Mint, the maker of the United Kingdom’s coins, has recently signed an agreement with Excir (a Canadian cleantech start-up) to introduce a world-first technology in the UK. Excir will retrieve and recycle gold and other precious metals from electronic waste, using them to create commemorative coins.
The Royal Mint has opened a large industrial plant in Llantrisant, Wales, where metals will be removed from e-waste. This project aims to reduce the company’s reliance on traditional mining and encourage more sustainable practices.
The extraction process begins when the circuit boards from laptops, phones, and televisions are separated into their various components. The array of detached coils, capacitors, pins, and transistors is sieved, sorted, sliced, and diced as it moves along a conveyor belt. Anything that contains gold is set aside.
The gold pieces are tipped into a chemical solution at an on-site chemical plant, which leaches the gold out into the liquid. The liquid is filtered, and what is left is a power of pure gold. Traditional gold recovery processes can be very energy-intensive and use harmful chemicals. This new method can be done at room temperature, at very low energy, and the gold can be extracted fairly quickly. Moreover, over 99% of the gold found in electronic waste is recovered using this method.
The Royal Mint says it has the capacity to process 4,000 tons of printed circuit boards a year. Initially, the recovered gold will be used to make jewellery, but it will eventually be used to make the commemorative coins. The Mint is also looking to create products with other metals, including aluminium, copper, tin, and steel. Furthermore, it is looking to see if the ground-up circuit boards could be used in the construction industry.
Recovering valuable materials from waste and obsolete products found in rare environments such as electronics, buildings, vehicles, and infrastructure is a process called urban mining. It is becoming increasingly important as we work towards reducing the need for new raw materials. Urban mining lowers the environmental impact associated with traditional mining, including habitat destruction, water use, and greenhouse gas emissions.
Urban mining is a key component of the circular economy, where products are designed to be reused, recycled, or repurposed, minimizing waste and maximizing resource efficiency.
And as it turns out, there is no shortage of e-waste in the UK. Over 62 million tonnes of e-waste was produced worldwide in 2022, and this number is expected to rise to 82 million tonnes by 2030. An e-waste report by the United Nations places the UK as the second biggest producer of e-waste per capita, the first being Norway.
The UK was known for shipping its waste overseas, but now it is finding uses for these elements. Finding a new purpose for e-waste in the UK comes at a good time, as the Royal Mint has moved away from making actual coins (due to the societal shift away from paying with cash). Reclaiming e-waste is an opportunity to create new jobs and foster new skills for the people of the UK.
This new partnership between the Royal Mint and Excir is important in how we move towards recovering and repurposing items and reducing waste. These efforts will help the Royal Mint, which has been around for over 1000 years, secure a future as a leader in sustainably sourced precious metals and the circular economy of the UK. It is hoped that other countries will follow suit and realize that e-waste is quite valuable economically and environmentally and that they should take action now.
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