The UK’s Royal mint is planning to recover several hundred kilograms of precious metals from e-waste. These precious metals will go into bars and coins. Here’s more on the revival.
Precious metal from e-waste
The United Kingdom’s Royal mint is very enthusiastic about its new plant in Llantrisant, South Wales where they will be reclaiming precious metal from e-waste. Starting next year, they will start extracting precious metal from circuit boards of mobiles and laptops. The circuit boards and other hardware in electronics contain gold, silver, and several other precious metals embedded in them. They are used for their conductive qualities but, are not recovered as people discard their unused electronics or incinerate them.
The 1,100-year-old Royal Mint is partnering with Excir, a Canadian start-up. Excir was successful in developing a chemical solution that can extract metals from circuit boards. “If you take all of the disused electronics around your home, that represents about seven percent of the world’s gold. That is a huge number and really gives us the initiative and imperative to start recycling those electronics,” stated Sean Millard. Millard is the chief growth officer at the Royal Mint. He also added that about seven percent of the world’s gold is present in the world’s e-waste. “As the volume of electronic waste increases each year, this problem is only set to become bigger,” he added.
More about the plant and the process
As per the Royal Mint, this process can recover “over 99% of the precious metals contained within electronic waste — selectively targeting the metal in seconds”. Unlike regular methods that use high-temperature smelters, this process takes place at room temperature. The facility in South Wales can process as much as 90 metric tons of e-waste every week. The Mint also stated that this can help in getting back “hundreds of kilograms” of gold every year. In addition to gold, it can help in recovering silver, copper, and palladium.