Britain’s oldest business has become the latest to embrace the circular economy — and in a big way. The UK Royal Mint has opened a new facility within its high-security complex to focus on retrieving precious metals from electronic waste.
The Precious Metals Recovery Plant in Llantrisant, Wales, has been designed to extract materials from 4,000 tonnes of circuit boards a year — which can yield as much as half a tonne of gold, 1,000 tonnes of copper, 2.5 tonnes of silver and 50kg of palladium.
Once recovered, the gold will then be used in the Mint’s “886” jewellery line, which was introduced in 2022 and is named after the year in which the company became a single institution, making its first coin. The circuit boards are stripped out of mobile phones, computers and other IT products, which are estimated to hold 7 per cent of the world’s gold.
Chief executive Anne Jessopp says the plant will be at full capacity by February 2025, at which point recovered metals will also be used in the Mint’s commemorative coins.
For what is, in effect, the UK’s oldest company, the transformation has been significant. Over four years, it has repurposed the 3,700 sq m of space — previously filled with heavy machinery that produced UK and foreign coins — into the world’s first factory set up for sustainable gold retrieval. It uses patented technology developed with Excir, a Canadian cleantech company, with which the Mint has an exclusive agreement to recover e-waste.
“We knew that coins were going to be used less and we needed to find a new source of income,” says Jessopp. “We’ve been here 1,100 years, so I thought, ‘Not on my watch does the Royal Mint finish.’ So we started to look at different businesses — but we really wanted to make sure that it was linked to our DNA, which is precious metals. Because sustainability is so important to us, we wanted to help solve environmental issues as well as providing jobs, based here in Wales, and sustainability makes good business. We should not be treating this material as a waste product but a critical resource in the UK.”
According to the UN Global E-Waste Monitor 2024, electronic waste is piling up globally as recycling levels remain low. Of the $15bn worth of gold embedded in electronic waste globally, only 22.3 per cent was recycled correctly in 2022. A record 62mn tonnes of e-waste was produced in 2022, an increase of 82 per cent on 2010 levels, and this is set to rise another 32 per cent, to 82mn, tonnes by 2030.
The UK is the world’s second-highest generator per capita of this e-waste, after Norway, and currently has 880mn unused electrical items. Most of the waste is shipped abroad for recycling.
However, while circuit boards contain recoverable, valuable materials, they are still typically incinerated at high temperatures, sent to landfill, or processed in unregulated and uncontrolled conditions, releasing elements such as mercury and plastic waste into the environment — increasing pollution risks to communities worldwide.
Royal Mint engineers — who had previously built and maintained coin-making machinery — decided to find a way to strip out the gold from these circuit boards, using Excir’s process. Unlike smelting the circuit boards, this process works at room temperature and repurposes every component: gold, copper, aluminium, 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, chief growth officer of the Royal Mint. “The beauty of what we have done is that, in its essence, it is around gold, but we didn’t want to be pirates and just take the gold and then ship the remaining waste to another country. Our mantra was to solve the entire problem, that is the big difference between us and the other technologies.”
A visit to the new plant reveals a complex chain of brightly coloured machinery that is the first of its kind in the world. A forklift truck tips sacks of circuit boards into a hopper that leads to a set-up of conveyor belts, vats, ovens and other equipment. All of this is designed to heat, tumble, separate, sort, shake, shred, scan and pulverise the boards. Once the copper, aluminium, silver, palladium and other elements are removed, the fragments of broken-down boards containing thin layers of gold are put in a rotating vat containing the Excir chemical solution. In four minutes, it leaches out the gold. When filtered and dried, the solution produces 999.9 purity gold.
The other elements are sold to refiners, and even the plastic finds a new life, typically in the production of concrete and bricks. “Each fraction that comes off a printed circuit board was previously destined to be a waste byproduct — but each one has an intrinsic value when we sell it on to specialist refineries,” explains Millard.
As The Royal Mint was a pioneer in this technology, each step in the process had to be either created from scratch or carried out on existing adapted machinery. It is low-carbon, too. In line with the company’s green promise, up to 70 per cent of its electricity is generated on site using solar panels, a combined heat and power plant with battery storage, and wind turbines.
Now, the Mint wants to take its knowhow beyond its south Wales facility, and share the technology. “The modular element of our plants means we can replicate it and we are already talking to a partner about expanding globally,” says Millard. “The IT industry is interested in what we are doing, as they begin to prioritise what happens to their end-of-life products and are looking to have completely circular operations where every atom is reused. This is where the world is going.”
https://www.ft.com/content/1ca28611-5ed7-4b58-bfe3-37dc84d321a9
