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The Royal Mint to build plant that will extract gold from e-waste

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LONDON — Britain’s Royal Mint plans to build a facility that will extract gold from electronic waste, with the plant set to be fully up and running in 2023.

Monday’s statement by the government-owned manufacturer of precious metal products and coins stated that it plans to use Excir Canada, which has “patented new chemical” in recovering gold from cell phone circuit boards and laptops.

According to The Royal Mint, the process is able to recover “over 99% of the precious metals contained within electronic waste — selectively targeting the metal in seconds.”

According to it, the recovery takes place at room temperatures rather than the extreme heat required by smelters for processing e-waste. Construction of the plant, which will be in South Wales (U.K.), where the mint is located, began this month.

The company said that it expects the facility will process 90 metric tonnes of circuit board sourced from Britain each week. The facility would be able to produce hundreds of kilograms each year of pure gold, the company said.

The Royal Mint made this statement following an announcement it made in Oct. 2021, in which the Royal Mint announced that Excir had agreed to help them roll out their technology in Britain. According to the Mint, this process may also allow for the recovery of copper, silver, or palladium.

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Electronic waste has become an important topic due to the rapid growth of new technology like smart phones, tablets, and laptops.

According to the Global E-waste Monitor 2020 Report, the world generated 53.6 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2019. According to the report, 17.4% of this waste had been “officially recorded as being properly collected and recycled.”

In addition to this low collection and recycling rate, the report also said e-waste contained harmful substances including mercury, hydrochlorofluorocarbons, chlorofluorocarbons and brominated flame retardants.

Excir, a company that focuses on recycling and repurposing e-waste is looking at ways to monetize as environmental and sustainability concerns mount.

Mint Innovation from New Zealand is one of the others. Ollie Crush will be the chief scientist officer of the company in 2020. told CNBC it had “developed a biological process for recovering valuable metalsYou can get weird and amazing feedstocks like electronic waste.

Crush stated that Mint Innovation was a company that took scrap material and “grinded it up to a consistency like sand.” 

“The reason why we do it is because we have to make certain that we expose all of the metal within for a chemical leaching process,” said he.

“For instance, when you look at circuit boards, they’ve got lots of chips on them — a lot of the value is contained within those chips, so we really need to make sure it’s exposed.”

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