For more than 1,000 years, the primary purpose of Britain’s Royal Mint has been to make coins. It has forged into metal the likenesses of England’s kings and queens from Alfred the Great, the ninth-century king of the West Saxons, to King Charles III. But as the use of cash steeply declines, the mint is undergoing a vast transformation to avoid becoming obsolete.
Its new purpose: recovering precious metals like gold from electronic waste and turning that metal into jewellery. Here’s how.
In the late 1960s, the Royal Mint moved from its home in the Tower of London to a vast complex of low-slung buildings outside Cardiff, Wales.
In what used to be the foundry, where metal was cast for coins, large bags of electronic waste arrive. The mint expects to process about 4,500 tons of e-waste, which includes circuit boards from televisions, computers and medical equipment, each year.
Discarded computer motherboards and electronic waste acquired by the Royal Mint, in Llantrisant, outside Cardiff, Wales. — 2025 The New York Times Company
Older electronics tend to have higher gold content than modern technology. Smaller circuit boards that have visibly high gold content are sent straight to the mint’s chemical plant to have the gold removed.
The rest goes into a depopulation machine, a multicolored, slowly rotating cylinder that heats the circuit boards to 230°C (446°F) to melt the solder so the components fall off the boards.
Then the boards and various components, such as microchips and aluminum capacitors, are shuffled onto a large, pink sorting machine. The pieces move along a vibrating sievelike conveyor belt, falling into different buckets depending on their size.
The pieces without gold are valuable, too. Metals like iron, copper and nickel can be sold to metal markets. And the rest of the waste, shredded down, can be sold to construction companies for building materials.
The Royal Mint has adapted many times, from silver pennies to gold coins, then to copper and other less valuable metals. It expanded its business to make the currency of other countries, as well as commemorative coins and gold bars for investment.
Electronic waste undergoes more acute gold extraction at the Royal Mint, in Llantrisant, outside Cardiff, Wales. — 2025 The New York Times Company
But this is different. During the Covid-19 pandemic, cash use plummeted. Since then, demand for new coins has nearly evaporated. Last year, the mint issued 15.8 million British coins, a 90% drop from the year before.
The Royal Mint recently stopped making coins for other countries. It has retained its ability to make British coins but is betting millions of pounds that the key to its survival is the precious-metal recovery plant, which started operating in earnest last summer.
“Who knows about coins in 20 years’ time?” said Anne Jessopp, CEO of the Royal Mint.
The company’s two new business lines – e-waste recycling and jewellery production – will take over, Jessopp predicted, as companies and consumers increasingly want goods that are ethically and sustainably sourced, amid a glut of e-waste.
By 2022, the world had produced 62 billion kilograms of waste from discarded electronics. Less than a quarter of it had been recorded as collected and recycled.
At the chemical plant, removing the gold is a relatively fast process. In just minutes, the gold is leached from the circuit boards in a patented solution, which oxidises the gold to make it soluble.
The solution, saturated with gold, has to go through another chemical process to make the gold solid again. The gold powder, which is filtered from the solution, is washed and dried. It looks surprisingly like ground coffee, but 100 grams is worth about £6,700 (RM37,699), or US$8,405.
Jewellery made from recovered gold, in the gift shop at the Royal Mint, in Llantrisant, outside Cardiff, Wales. — 2025 The New York Times Company
The powder is then melted at above 1,100°C (2,012°F) and cooled again to make gold nuggets, which are then sent off-site to be refined to 99.9% purity.
The gold returns to the Royal Mint as long rods, which go through annealing, a process of heating and cooling the gold to make it more malleable. Every part of the jewellery, down to the hooks that attach pendants to necklace chains, is handmade at the mint.
The result is a sleek line of jewellery, called 886, named for the year the mint first produced coins.
It has a price fitting for the flagship store’s Mayfair, London, location: A pair of small, 9-karat gold hoop earrings costs £795 (RM4,473 or about US$1,000). – ©2025 The New York Times Company