London – The UK’s Royal Mint, the country’s official coin maker, has opened a factory that will extract gold from electronic waste to reduce its reliance on traditional mining and encourage more sustainable practices.
“The facility reinforces our commitment to using sustainable precious metals and providing a new source of high-quality recovered gold,” Royal Mint Chief Growth Officer Sean Millard said in a statement. “It allows us to reduce our reliance on mined materials and is another example of how we are working to decarbonise our operations.”
Document distributed by Tom Wren / Royal Mint
The Royal Mint’s new plant is located in Wales and uses Canadian technology to extract gold from circuit boards found in items such as phones, laptops and televisions. The extraction process is done quickly and at room temperature, which doesn’t use much energy. The Mint says the plant has the capacity to process 4,000 tonnes of circuit boards per year, and the recovered gold is already being used in a luxury jewellery collection produced by the Mint.
“What we’re doing here is urban mining,” Inga Doak, the Royal Mint’s head of sustainability, told CBS News’ sister channel BBC News. “We’re taking a waste product that society produces, extracting gold from that waste product and starting to see the value in this finite resource.”
In a statement, the Royal Mint cited the global decline in the use of cash as a catalyst for change. As fewer people use coins, fewer people are needed to make them.
“We are not only preserving limited precious metals for future generations, but we are also preserving the craftsmanship that the Royal Mint is renowned for and creating new jobs and reskilling opportunities for our employees,” said Jessopp.
According to the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, e-waste production is increasing by 2.6 million tons per year. Less than a quarter of this waste is properly collected and recycled, “leaving $62 billion of recoverable natural resources unaccounted for and increasing pollution risks for communities around the world.”
“The new plant offers a more sustainable solution to this growing environmental challenge,” the Royal Mint said. “It has been designed to ensure that valuable and limited resources are recovered and other materials are appropriately treated for further processing.”
