The Royal Mint Will Extract Gold From Old Phones

Recently, the Royal Mint announced they were going to introduce a recycling program to extract gold from electronic waste as less than 20% of electronic waste ends up being recycled and most of that is sent abroad to be smelted ...

Go on, think about it; how many old smartphones do you have stashed away in drawers and cupboards around your home? How many old printers are in the garage? Old TVs, game consoles and even computers get forgotten about and left to gather dust. Multiply that by hundreds of millions of devices, and you can imagine that's a lot of unused gold knocking about the country.

"This could make a genuine impact on the UK's recycling efforts!"

You see, circuit boards have precious metals in them. Admittedly in tiny amounts, but when you consider the numbers, it's worth doing. The Royal Mint is using new technology to do this quickly and efficiently, allowing them to recover 99% of the precious metals from circuit boards through some very special chemistry.

The process at the heart of this recovery production line works at room temperature, and it has been installed at the Royal Mint itself in Rhondda Cynon Taf, which means the UK's electronic waste doesn't have to be exported around the world.

They've already small amounts of recovered gold, palladium, silver and copper from old circuit boards, so the technology to do it works; they just need to scale it up now!

How great that the Royal Mint is doing this? Ok, there's money to be made here (of course), but if it creates a circular economy by recovering and reusing precious metals originally mined from around the world, that can only be a good thing.

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