Royal Mint turns e-waste gold into jewellery

The Royal Mint is recovering gold from electronic waste at a plant near Cardiff in Wales and using the metal to make jewellery.

Sean Millard, the Royal Mint's development director, said the plant, opened two years ago, can process around 4,000 tonnes of electronic waste a year containing about 400 kilos of gold. Old Bank of England office phones are among the devices being stripped down there.

Each Bank of England office phone recycled at the plant contains about 30 milligrammes of gold, worth around £3, while a modern smartphone contains roughly £4 worth of the metal. The Royal Mint dismantles devices before treatment, with copper, tantalum and plastics from circuit boards sorted and sold to specialist recyclers.

Instead of bulk smelting or corrosive acid mixtures, the Royal Mint uses a room-temperature process patented by Canadian company Excir. Kate Griffiths, a chemical analyst at the Royal Mint, said the process requires “no external energy input” and can be reused across batches.

After refining, the extracted gold is used in jewellery for the Royal Mint's 886 brand. The mint also uses recycled silver, including some extracted from old radios supplied by British hospitals.

A United Nations report said only 22.3% of electronic waste worldwide was properly collected and recycled in 2022, and warned that improper recycling can release lead, mercury or plastics into the environment and contribute to climate change.

Jason Hallett, a professor of sustainable chemical technology at Imperial College London, said high gold prices can make alternative recovery methods commercially viable, as long as extraction processes do not drive up energy use or emissions.