Electronic waste, or e-waste, is a growing problem, with millions of tonnes of hard-to-recycle waste being produced every year from discarded and obsolete gadgets.
Now, the UK’s Royal Mint has announced plans to recover precious metal, including from e-waste, using a “world first” technology.
The Government-owned Royal Mint is teaming up with Canadian tech company Excir for the project.
Excir has not revealed the exact details of the proprietary technology involved, but it does make use of a lixiviant, a liquid medium used to selectively extract a desired metal from an ore or composite material.
The company says that its lixiviant is a mild solution that can itself be effectively recycled with a “negligible” environmental impact.
Circuit boards are prepared using a “unique process” before being exposed to the patented mix of chemicals.
The gold is extracted from the mixture to create a gold-rich liquid and the gold is then recovered using precipitation.
The precious metal can then be melted and shaped into ingots, ready for use in Royal Mint products.
Initial tests of the technology at the Royal Mint achieved the recovery of gold with a purity of 999.9 – in other words, virtually pure or 24-carat gold.
Moving forward, the process could also be used to recover other precious and useful metals, including silver, copper and palladium.
The new technology can recover more than 99% of gold from e-waste
The patented process is able to recover more than 99% of the gold content present in e-waste, making the extraction in seconds and at room temperature.
Scientists and engineers employed by the Royal Mint are currently working on scaling up the technology to be used in mass production quantities.
Anne Jessop, the organisation’s chief executive, said that the partnership gave the opportunity to have a major impact on one of the greatest environmental challenges currently facing the world.
She added that the technology had a huge potential to reduce the impact of e-waste while allowing the preservation of precious materials.
Last week, researchers estimated that more than 57 million tonnes of e-waste will be discarded in 2021.
Currently, less than a fifth of e-waste is recycled globally, leading to at least $57bn of precious materials being discarded annually.
Dr Ruediger Kuehr, director of the UN’s Sustainable Cycles (SCYCLE) programme, said that a tonne of discarded mobile phones was actually richer in gold than a tonne of gold ore.
Today’s news was brought to you by TD SYNNEX – the UK’s number one solutions distributor.
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