Royal Mint Reveals New Factory Extracting Gold from E-Waste
The Royal Mint has unveiled a new factory that extracts gold from everyday items.
The Royal Mint unveiled a new factory that provides a more sustainable source of gold and reduces reliance on mining.
The facility is located in South Wales and uses the world's first patented chemistry from Canadian cleantech company Excir. It extracts gold from printed circuit boards (PCBs) found in everyday items such as TVs, laptops, and mobile phones in minutes. Excir’s chemistry works at room temperature, creating a more energy-efficient and cost-effective method of gold recovery.
The factory has scaled the innovative technology from laboratory to industrial level and can process up to 4,000 tons of PCBs from e-waste annually. It provides the UK’s oldest company with a more sustainable way to “mine” high-quality 999.9 purity gold. Recovered gold is already being used in the luxury jewelry collection 886 by The Royal Mint.
According to the United Nations’ Global E-waste Monitor, the generation of worldwide e-waste is rising by 2.6 million tons every year. A record 62 million tons of e-waste was produced in 2022, up 82 percent from 2010.
The new factory offers a more sustainable solution to this growing environmental challenge. It has been designed to ensure that valuable finite resources are recovered and other materials are appropriately treated for onward processing.
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