The UK’s Royal Mint has embarked on a side hustle extracting gold from old phones, TVs and other electronic waste, Sky News reports. According to the director of the coin-maker’s Precious Metals Recovery business unit, Mark Loveridge, the Mint’s process is a “world first”.
Its alchemy-like operation takes place at a factory in south Wales, which is expected to handle up to 4,000 tonnes of printed circuit boards from e-waste every year. Gold and silver are removed from e-waste and turned into commemorative coins and elegant jewellery, available to buy.
It reportedly takes around 600 mobile phones to extract enough gold to make a single ring in the Mint’s collection. On average, each tonne of circuit boards produces 165 grams of gold – worth around £9,000 (92,000 patacas).
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Loverage said that most people have “probably got a couple of mobile phones sat in a drawer and [a] TV in the back bedroom or the garage … that needs to come back into that supply chain so it can be recycled and those materials recovered.”
At the Royal Mint’s new factory, non-precious metals like copper, tin, steel, aluminium extracted from the e-waste are being sent to other companies to be recycled into new products.
A recent United Nations-funded study found that the world generated 62 tonnes of e-waste in 2022, and recycled less than a quarter of it. The report noted that e-waste – defined as any discarded product with a plug or battery – was a toxic hazard to human health and the environment.
