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.
