ROYAL MINT RECYCLES GOLD ELECTRONIC WASTE

 

For more than a thousand years, the primary purpose of Britain's Royal Mint has been to make coins. It has forged into metal the likeness of England's kings and queens from Alfred the Great, the ninth-century king of the West Saxons, to King Charles III. But as the use of cash steeply declines, the mint is undergoing a vast transformation to avoid becoming obsolete.

Its new purpose: recovering precious metals, like gold, from electronic waste. And turning that metal into jewelry. Here's how.

In the late 1960s, the Royal Mint moved from its home in the Tower of London to a vast complex of low-slung buildings outside Cardiff, Wales.

In what used to be the foundry, where metal was cast for coins, large bags of electronic waste arrive. The mint expects to process about 4,500 tons of e-waste, which includes circuit boards from televisions, computers and medical equipment, each year.

Older electronics are better because they tend to have higher gold content than modern, more efficient technology. Smaller circuit boards that have visibly high gold content are sent straight on to the mint's chemical plant to have the gold removed.

The rest goes into a depopulation machine, a multicolored, slowly rotating cylinder that heats the circuit boards to 230 degrees Celsius (446 degrees Fahrenheit) to melt the solder so the components fall off the boards.

Then the boards and various components, such as microchips and aluminum capacitors, are shuffled onto a large, pink sorting machine. The pieces move along a vibrating sieve-like conveyor belt, falling into different buckets depending on their size.

The pieces without gold are valuable, too. Metals like iron, copper and nickel can be sold to metal markets. And the rest of the waste, shredded down, can be sold to construction companies for building materials.

The Royal Mint has adapted many times in its past, from silver pennies to gold coins, then to copper and other less valuable metals. It expanded its business to make the currency of other countries, as well as commemorative coins and gold bars for investment.

But this is different. During the Covid pandemic, cash use plummeted. Since then, demand for new coins has nearly evaporated. Last year, the mint issued 15.8 million British coins, a 90 percent drop from the year before.

The Royal Mint recently shut down its business making coins for other countries. It has retained its ability to make British coins but is betting millions of pounds that the key to its survival is the precious metal recovery plant, which started operating in earnest last summer.

"Who knows about coins in 20 years' time?" said Anne Jessop, the mint's chief executive.

 

To read the complete article, see:
How an Old Laptop Is Transformed Into 9-Karat Gold Earrings (https://www.nytimes.com/card/2025/01/01/business/uk-royal-mint-jewelry)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
ROYAL MINT'S NEW GOLD EXTRACTION PROCESS (https://www.coinbooks.org/v27/esylum_v27n10a24.html)

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