The UK's Royal Mint has cut the ribbon on its Precious Metals Recovery factory, which extracts material from old Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs).

E-waste is a growing headache for the world and includes anything from end-of-life electronics to the contents of those boxes you can't bear to part with. According to the Royal Mint, "It is often summarized as anything with a battery or a plug."

Circa 50 million metric tons of e-waste are generated by Brits every year, a figure that is expected to reach a staggering 120 million tons by 2050, says the Royal Mint, which is the UK's official producer of British coins.

This makes the 4,000 metric tons of e-waste which the Royal Mint says its "World First Precious Metals Recovery Factory" can process feel like a drop in the ocean. However, it is a start and focuses on pulling material from PCBs.

The Royal Mint says 99 percent of gold can be extracted from PCBs. Also recoverable on-site or through downstream processes are silver, palladium, copper, iron, aluminum, and tantalum.

Pulling gold from e-waste is not a new concept, but it has historically involved some rather energy-intensive processes. According to the Royal Mint, the UK facility uses a new method created by Canadian-based Excir, which works at room temperature and selectively targets gold within seconds.

The process can reportedly generate up to 450kg of gold from those 4,000 tons. The Royal Mint says the recovered gold would be used predominantly within its own line of sustainable jewellery, "but can be used across all gold products."

As anyone faced with recycling obsolete computer equipment will attest, the amount of gold that can be extracted depends very much on the type of PCB involved.

According to a UN report, e-waste is growing five times faster than it can be recycled. Dealing with the problem is a challenge. One approach is to change how old electrical goods are disposed of. Another is to make it easier and more economical to repair broken equipment, thanks in part to right-to-repair legislation.

The solution is most likely a combination of all approaches, although Microsoft's plan to render millions of perfectly functional PCs obsolete at a stroke, thanks to the hardware requirements of Windows 11, will not help those efforts. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/08/uk_royal_mint_metals_pcbs/