Britain’s Royal Mint turning e-waste into gold jewellery

 ESHE NELSON

For more than 1,000 years, the primary purpose of Britain’s Royal Mint has been to make coins. It has forged into metal the likenesses 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 it into jewellery. The mint expects to process 4,500 tonnes of e-waste, which includes circuit boards from televisions, computers and medical equipment, each year.

Older electronics tend to have higher gold content than modern technology. Smaller circuit boards that have visibly high gold content are sent straight to the mint’s chemical plant to have the gold removed.

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

Then the boards and various components, such as microchips and aluminium capacitors, are shuffled onto a large sorting machine. The pieces move along a vibrating sievelike 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. The rest of the waste, shredded down, can be sold to construction companies.

The Royal Mint has adapted many times, from silver pennies to gold coins, then to copper and other less valuable metals. But this is different. During the COVID-19 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% drop from the year before.

The Royal Mint recently stopped 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. “Who knows about coins in 20 years’ time,” said its CEO Anne Jessopp.

The company’s two new business lines — e-waste recycling and jewellery production — will take over, Jessopp predicted, as companies and consumers increasingly want goods that are ethically and sustainably sourced, amid a glut of e-waste.

By 2022, the world had produced 62 billion kilograms of waste from discarded electronics. Less than a quarter of it had been recorded as collected and recycled.

At the chemical plant, removing the gold is a relatively fast process. In just minutes, the gold is leached from the circuit boards in a patented solution, which oxidizes the gold to make it soluble.

The solution has to go through another chemical process to make the gold solid again. The gold powder, filtered from the solution, is washed and dried. It looks like ground coffee, but 100 grams is worth $8,405.

The powder is then melted at above 1,100 degrees Celsius (2,012 degrees Fahrenheit) and cooled again to make gold nuggets, which are then sent off-site to be refined to 99.9% purity.

Every part of the jewellery is handmade at the mint. A pair of small, 9-karat gold hoop earrings costs 795 pounds (about $1,000).