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In Wales, the UK's Royal Mint has opened a facility to recycle electronic components and printed circuit boards to recover the gold they contain. This is reported by techcult.ru with reference to The Royal Mint.
It is predicted that the volume of e-waste in the UK could rise from the current 50 million tonnes per year to 120 million tonnes by 2050. The global increase in e-waste is 2.6 million metric tons annually.
Current recycling methods are ineffective due to high energy consumption and the use of harmful chemicals.
The situation is aggravated by the policies of large IT companies, which are constantly increasing hardware requirements, which leads to accelerated obsolescence of digital devices. At the same time, physical money, especially precious metal coins, is losing popularity, threatening the existence of mints.
To solve this problem, the Royal Mint introduced technology from the Canadian company Excir. The process involves heating the boards, dismantling and crushing components, chemical treatment to separate the gold, and then filtering it. The resulting gold is used to make souvenir coins and jewelry. It is expected that up to 450 kg of gold will be recovered from 4,000 tons of waste per year.