Royal Mint strikes gold with e-waste recovery facility

Britain’s oldest business has become the latest to embrace the circular economy – and in a big way. Britain’s Royal Mint has opened a new facility within its high-security complex to focus on recovering precious metals from electronic waste.

The precious metals recovery plant in Llantrisant, Wales, has been designed to extract material from 4,000 tonnes of circuit boards per year – which can produce up to half a tonne of gold, 1,000 tonnes of copper, 2, 5 tons of silver and 50 kg of palladium. .

Once recovered, the gold will then be used in the Mint’s “886” jewelry line, which was introduced in 2022 and is named after the year the company became a single institution, making its first coin. Circuit boards are removed from mobile phones, computers and other IT products, which are estimated to hold 7% of the world’s gold.

Chief executive Anne Jessopp says the factory will be at full capacity by February 2025, at which point the recovered metals will also be used in the Mint’s commemorative coins.

For what is effectively Britain’s oldest company, the transformation has been significant. Over four years, he repurposed the 3,700 square meters of space – previously filled with heavy machinery producing UK and overseas coins – into the world’s first factory set up for the sustainable recovery of gold. It uses patented technology developed in conjunction with Excir, a Canadian cleantech company with which the Mint has an exclusive e-waste recovery agreement.

“We knew the coins would be used less and we needed to find a new source of income,” says Jessopp. “We’ve been here for 1,100 years, so I thought, ‘Not on my watch is the Royal Mint ending.’ So we started looking at different businesses – but we really wanted to make sure they were connected to our DNA, which is precious metals. Because sustainability is so important to us, we wanted to help solve environmental problems as well as providing jobs, based here in Wales, and sustainability makes good business. We should not be treating this material as waste, but a critical resource in the UK.”

We knew that coins would be used less – we had to find a new source of income

According to the UN Global E-Waste Monitor 2024, e-waste is piling up globally as recycling levels remain low. Of the $15 billion worth of gold embedded in e-waste globally, only 22.3% was correctly recycled in 2022. A record 62 million tonnes of e-waste was produced in 2022, an increase of 82 % from the level of 2010, and this is established. to increase by another 32% to 82 million tons by 2030.

The UK is the second largest per capita generator of this e-waste, after Norway, and currently has 880 million unused electrical items. Most of the waste is sent abroad for recycling.

However, although circuit boards contain valuable recoverable materials, they are still typically incinerated at high temperatures, sent to landfill or processed under unregulated and uncontrolled conditions, releasing elements such as mercury and plastic waste into the environment – increasing the risks of pollution to communities around the world. .

Royal Mint engineers – who previously built and maintained coin-making machines – decided to find a way to remove the gold from these circuit boards, using the Excir process. Unlike melting circuit boards, this process works at room temperature and reuses every component: gold, copper, aluminum, steel—even the plastic boards themselves.

“The lightbulb moment was when we saw gold coming off a circuit board in seconds with Excir’s chemistry,” says Sean Millard, director of growth at the Royal Mint. “The beauty of what we’ve done is that at its core it’s around gold, but we didn’t want to be pirates and take the gold and then send the leftover waste to another country. Our mantra has been to solve the whole problem, that’s the big difference between us and other technologies.”

A tour of the new factory reveals a complex chain of brightly colored machinery, which is the first of its kind in the world. A forklift lifts bags of circuit boards into a hopper that leads to a configuration of conveyor belts, vats, ovens and other equipment. All of these are designed for heating, tipping, separating, sorting, shaking, shredding, scanning and pulverizing plates. Once the copper, aluminum, silver, palladium and other elements are removed, the fragments of broken down plates containing thin layers of gold are placed in a rotating vat containing the Excir chemical solution. In four minutes, remove the gold. When filtered and dried, the solution produces gold of 999.9 purity.

The other elements are sold to refineries and even the plastic finds a new life, usually in the production of concrete and bricks. “Every fraction that comes out of a printed circuit board was previously destined to be a waste by-product – but each one has intrinsic value when we sell it to specialist refiners,” explains Millard.

As the Royal Mint was a pioneer in this technology, every step of the process had to be either created from scratch or carried out on existing adapted machinery. It also has low carbon emissions. In keeping with the company’s green promise, up to 70% of its electricity is generated on site using solar panels, a combined heat and power plant with storage and wind turbines.

Now the Mint wants to take its knowledge beyond the South Wales facility and share the technology. “The modular element of our plants means we can replicate it and we’re already talking to a partner about global expansion,” says Millard. “The IT industry is interested in what we do because they are starting to prioritize what happens to their end-of-life products and are looking to have fully circular operations where every atom is reused. This is where the world goes.”