{"id":1654,"date":"2024-08-12T15:39:39","date_gmt":"2024-08-12T14:39:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.redstareducation.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1654"},"modified":"2024-08-12T15:39:39","modified_gmt":"2024-08-12T14:39:39","slug":"royal-mint-begins-extracting-gold-from-e-waste","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.redstareducation.co.uk\/blog\/royal-mint-begins-extracting-gold-from-e-waste\/","title":{"rendered":"Royal Mint Begins Extracting Gold from E-Waste"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Royal Mint has started to extract gold from within old phones and televisions to transform it into commemorative coins and jewellery.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What is E-Waste?<\/h2>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It is a significant global issue which causes both human and environmental harm.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The UK\u2019s Role<\/h2>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The UK is one of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nhm.ac.uk\/discover\/what-is-ewaste-and-what-can-we-do-about-it.html#:~:text=E%2Dwaste%20(electronic%20waste),Piles%20of%20mixed%20electronic%20waste.\">largest producers<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In fact, <a href=\"https:\/\/www3.weforum.org\/docs\/WEF_A_New_Circular_Vision_for_Electronics.pdf\">USwitch<\/a> estimated that around 40% of the UK\u2019s e-waste is illegally exported to be disposed of in other countries.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Often, exporting these materials leads to entire villages sorting components, including their children, with no safety gear.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A Global Issue<\/h2>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Less than 20% of this e-waste is recycled, meaning that precious, valuable metals are discarded every day rather than being collected and reused.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Royal Mint<\/h2>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.royalmint.com\/aboutus\/press-centre\/turning-electronic-waste-into-gold\/\">The Royal Mint<\/a> have opened a factory in South Wales to process up to 4,000 tonnes of printed circuit boards from e-waste every year.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The UK\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Excir\u2019s patented technology recovers over 99% of gold from e-waste within circuit boards of discarded laptops and mobiles.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It takes around 600 mobile phones to create one of their rings from The Royal Mint\u2019s 886 collection, which weigh around the same as a \u00a31 coin (7.5g). One tonne of circuit boards produces around 165gm of gold, which is equal to \u00a39,000.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\n<h3 style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Back in March this year, our sister company Red Star Wealth produced a<a href=\"https:\/\/www.redstarwealth.co.uk\/blog\/e-waste-part-1-of-a-2-part-series\/\"> two-part blog series<\/a> all about E-Waste. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.redstarwealth.co.uk\/blog\/e-waste-part-2-of-a-2-part-series\/\">As stated then,<\/a>\u201cwe are missing out on opportunities to reclaim valuable raw materials just from failing to properly process our electronic waste\u201d. It seems that this decision from the Royal Mint is a step towards solving this wider problem, and hopefully it will pave the way for a wider movement of safely, and properly, recycling electronic waste.<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":1655,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[1139],"tags":[1141,1142,1143,1140,1152,1147,1149,1146,1150,1148,1151,1144,1145],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v19.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Royal Mint Begins Extracting Gold from E-Waste - Red Star Education Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.redstareducation.co.uk\/blog\/royal-mint-begins-extracting-gold-from-e-waste\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Royal Mint Begins Extracting Gold from E-Waste - Red Star Education Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Royal Mint has started to extract gold from within old phones and televisions to transform it into commemorative coins and jewellery. 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