There’s a new gold rush happening, but it’s not in the Wild West of the U.S. Instead, it’s being referred to as urban mining, extracting gold from recycled electronics components. The latest entrant in the rush is the Royal Mint, the United Kingdom’s official maker of British coins. The Royal Mint has just opened a large factory in South Wales to recover gold from old circuit boards.
The Royal Mint’s new Precious Metals Recovery factory is a nearly 40,000-square-foot facility that uses patented chemistry developed by Canadian firm Excir. This technology recovers high-quality 999.9 gold from PCBs found in consumer electronics like TVs, laptops, and mobile phones.
Major tech companies have been recovering precious metals from PCBs for some time already. Dell has its own e-waste recycling program that met its goal of recycling 2 billion pounds of e-waste by 2020 two years early, in 2018. Apple has also implemented processes to recover tin, aluminum, and other materials for use in manufacturing its new products. What the Royal Mint is doing, though, might be the first time a jewelry maker has directly entered into recovering those precious resources for itself.
The process takes only a few minutes, and experts say it is more energy-efficient and cost-effective than traditional methods of mining gold. The new factory is capable of processing up to 4,400 tons of PCBs each year, yielding as much as half a ton of gold in the process. At current prices, that gold is worth roughly £27 million ($34 million).
There’s no shortage of PCBs to recover the metal from, either. According to the United Nations, the world produced a whopping 68 million tons of e-waste in 2022. The Royal Mint’s new factory is designed to recover the valuable resources the company can use in crafting its jewelry. The less important materials, like aluminum, copper, tin, and steel, are treated to expedite onward recycling and other processing efforts.
The Royal Mint is already using recovered gold to produce luxury jewelry items. Its new 886 line includes necklaces, bracelets, pendants, earrings, signet rings, and more. Items in this collection range in price from £275 ($350) to £110,000 ($140,000) each.
In addition to the innovative new way to obtain gold for its jewelry, the Royal Mint’s factory is creating new jobs. According to Anne Jessopp, chief executive at Royal Mint, the oldest business in the U.K. is “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.”
Jessopp added, “We have ambitious plans, and I am proud that we are safeguarding the Royal Mint for another 1,100 years.”
