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Royal Mint to build plant to turn WEEE into gold

The Royal Mint has announced plans to build a plant in Llantrisant, South Wales, to recover gold from waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE).

When the facility is fully operational in 2023, The Royal Mint expects to process up to 90 tonnes of UK-sourced circuit boards per week (picture: The Royal Mint)

Construction of the plant is set to begin this month.

When the facility is fully operational in 2023, The Royal Mint expects to process up to 90 tonnes of UK-sourced circuit boards per week, generating “hundreds of kilograms” of gold each year.

The facility will also support around 40 jobs, The Royal Mint says.

Anne Jessopp, chief executive of The Royal Mint, said: “We are transforming our business for the future – expanding into areas which complement our expertise in precious metals, champion sustainability and support employment.

“Our investment in a new plant will see The Royal Mint become a leader in sustainably sourced precious metals and provide the UK with a much-needed domestic solution to the growing problem of electronic waste.”

Chemistry

The facility will use a “patented new chemistry” created by Canadian technology start-up Excir which targets and extracts precious metals from the circuit boards of discarded laptops and mobile phones.

Instead of WEEE leaving UK shores to be processed at high temperatures in smelters, The Royal Mint says, this will see precious metals recovered at room temperature.

The Royal Mint says the plant will be able to process an entire circuit board, while the chemistry recovers more than 99% of the gold contained within WEEE for use within the business.

Sean Millard, chief growth officer at The Royal Mint, said: “This approach is revolutionary and offers huge potential to reuse our planet’s precious resources, reduce the environmental footprint of electronic waste and create new jobs.

“We estimate that 99% of the UK’s circuit boards are currently shipped overseas to be processed at high temperatures in smelters.

“As the volume of electronic waste increases each year, this problem is only set to become bigger.

“When fully operational our plant will be the first of its kind in the world – processing tonnes of electronic waste each week and providing a new source of high-quality gold direct to The Royal Mint.”

Innovation

Though the Royal Mint says the proposed plant the first of its kind, this would make it the second such claim in as many weeks, after the GAP Group and technology firm Descycle announced plans to build a joint “multi-million pound” facility to recycle metals from WEEE in the North East (see letsrecycle.com story).

GAP Group’s managing director, Peter Moody, pictured at his company’s existing WEEE recycling facility in Gateshead

Last year, IT lifecycle services specialist N2S trialled using bacteria to recover precious metals, a process developed in partnership with Coventry University.

And, New Zealand start-up Mint Innovation has unveiled plans for a commercial refinery in Cheshire which similarly uses bacteria to extract precious metals from WEEE.

Precious metals

Data from Material Focus, the not-for-profit organisation funded by the WEEE compliance fee and behind the Recycle Your Electricals campaign, shows 95 tonnes of precious metals with a value of £857 million could be recycled from unwanted electricals each year. This includes gold, silver, and palladium.

Scott Butler is executive director of Material Focus

The research also indicates that there would be enough gold to make more than 858,000 rings if all the unwanted electricals hoarded or thrown away every year in the UK were recycled.

Welcoming The Royal Mint’s announcement, Scott Butler, Material Focus’s executive director, said: “The Royal Mint’s innovative plant joins other companies who are beginning the exciting journey that the UK is commencing to realise the huge potential that could be achieved if we were all to recycle our electricals.”

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