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In context: The Royal Mint, which has been producing British cash because the Center Ages, is now adapting to a world the place bodily cash is changing into much less important. In an effort to reinvent itself, the long-standing establishment is transitioning into an expert e-waste remedy facility.
After saying its “revolutionary” e-waste recycling plan a couple of years in the past, the UK Royal Mint has now begun turning digital gadgets and PCBs into pure gold. The federal government-owned firm is utilizing its industrial plant in Llantrisant, Wales, to extract gold from e-waste and remodel it into jewellery merchandise and, ultimately, commemorative cash.
Conventional strategies for recovering gold from PCBs are extremely energy-intensive and depend on poisonous chemical compounds, in response to the Royal Mint’s operations director, Leighton John. The Llantrisant facility, nevertheless, makes use of a brand new approach developed by the Canadian firm Excir, which reportedly achieves the identical outcomes at room temperature and extracts gold way more shortly.
The Royal Mint expects to course of as much as 4,000 tons of e-waste every year, extracting 99 % of the gold from PCBs and producing as much as 450 kilograms of the dear metallic. Through the extraction course of, circuit boards are heated to take away digital elements. Coils, capacitors, pins, and transistors are then sorted and shredded earlier than being processed in an on-site chemical plant.
Excir’s expertise immerses the elements in a chemical answer, which is then filtered to depart behind pure gold powder. This powder might be heated in a furnace to kind stable gold as soon as once more. Historically, the UK has shipped its e-waste abroad for processing, however now the Royal Mint can deal with the complete course of in-house, in response to John.
The Royal Mint emphasizes that end-of-life electronics, discarded computer systems, and something “with a battery or a plug” contribute to 50 million tons of e-waste per yr within the UK. Moreover, e-waste is anticipated to achieve 120 million tons by 2050. A latest UN report signifies that world e-waste is rising at a price of two.6 million metric tons yearly.
Whereas modern options for creating simply recyclable circuit board supplies are in improvement, Microsoft’s {hardware} restrictions for Home windows 11 may doubtlessly flip a whole lot of tens of millions of computer systems into e-waste. The Royal Mint’s new gold recycling initiative affords an extra answer to the rising e-waste drawback and gives a chance to diversify the normal coin-making enterprise. With the reducing demand for bodily cash, this e-waste processing facility may assist Mint workers retain their jobs in the meanwhile.
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