The Royal Mint has started extracting gold embedded in old phones and TVs to make commemorative coins and jewellery in what has been hailed as a “world first”.
The UK’s coinmaker has opened a factory in South Wales which will be processing up to 4,000 tonnes of printed circuit boards from e-waste every year.
Anne Jessopp, Royal Mint chief executive, said it is “transforming for the future” and the opening of its Precious Metals Recovery factory “marks a pivotal step in our journey”.
As well as recycling the circuit boards it receives, the Royal Mint is also working towards receiving the entire items – computers, mobile phones, server equipment – so it can be involved in the full process.
It comes as a recent UN report says e-waste is rising five times faster than e-waste recycling – with an 82% jump on 2010 to a record 62 million tonnes in 2022.
The UK, meanwhile, is among the worst offenders per capita, according to Mark Loveridge, business unit director at Precious Metals Recovery.
Mr Loveridge said the factory processes, which aim to reduce mining, were a “world first”.
He said the UK’s amount of e-waste is “the equivalent of about 25 kilos a person”, or the equivalent of a 50-inch TV.
It takes around 600 mobile phones to create one of the rings from the Mint’s 886 collection, weighing around 7.5g – similar to the weight of a £1 coin.
On average, one tonne of circuit boards produces 165gm of gold, equating to around £9,000.
Read more:
Why are disposable vapes bad for the environment?
What happens when you recycle your phone?
The silver and gold are used by the official maker of British coins to produce jewellery and commemorative coins.
The non-precious metal that is recovered, such as copper, tin, steel, aluminium, is sent to other companies as a raw material to turn them into products such as sheets, bars and rods to manufacture new products.
“We all have our jar at home where we put our coins into. It’s the same with our electronic devices,” Mr Loveridge said.
“You have probably got a couple of mobile phones sat in a drawer and TV in the back bedroom or the garage or something that needs to come back into that supply chain so it can be recycled and those materials recovered.”