The Royal Mint has started to extract gold from within old phones and televisions to transform it into commemorative coins and jewellery.
What is E-Waste?
E-waste, short for electronic waste, is all electronic and electrical equipment and its parts that have been discarded as waste without the intent of re-use. It is not biodegradable.
It is a significant global issue which causes both human and environmental harm.
The UK’s Role
The UK is one of the largest producers of household e-waste in the entire world. By dumping our broken or unwanted electronics in landfill sites, the toxic substances within them can then leach into soil and water, damaging our water supplies and harming wildlife.
By throwing away the non-renewable resources contained within these electrical items, such as gold, silver, copper, platinum, aluminium and cobalt, we are getting rid of precious materials that are not an endless resource. Disposing of electronic waste in this way is harmful and wasteful.
One alternative to landfill is recycling, but this usually means exporting this waste to other countries to deal with, where labour laws and health and safety are not as stringent, and can often put workers at risk.
In fact, USwitch estimated that around 40% of the UK’s e-waste is illegally exported to be disposed of in other countries.
Often, exporting these materials leads to entire villages sorting components, including their children, with no safety gear.
A Global Issue
Currently, more than 50 million tonnes of e-waste is produced every single year around the globe, and is set to reach 74 million tonnes by 2030.
Less than 20% of this e-waste is recycled, meaning that precious, valuable metals are discarded every day rather than being collected and reused.
The Royal Mint
The Royal Mint have opened a factory in South Wales to process up to 4,000 tonnes of printed circuit boards from e-waste every year.
The UK’s coin maker signed an agreement with Excir, a Canadian clean tech start up, in order to introduce this technology to the UK, wherein gold and other precious metals can be safely retrieved and recycled from electronic waste.
Excir’s patented technology recovers over 99% of gold from e-waste within circuit boards of discarded laptops and mobiles.
It takes around 600 mobile phones to create one of their rings from The Royal Mint’s 886 collection, which weigh around the same as a £1 coin (7.5g). One tonne of circuit boards produces around 165gm of gold, which is equal to £9,000.
They are also working towards eventually receiving the entire electrical item, rather than just the circuit boards themselves, so that they can be more involved in the full process of recycling these materials.
This is an exciting new step towards making sure e-waste is handled in a safe and regulated manner, to help preserve our natural resources and reduce the damaging environmental impact of e-waste.