The Royal Mint, maker of the UK’s coins, has begun processing electronic waste to extract gold from it, the BBC reported.
The company has built a large industrial plant on its site in Llantrisant in Wales to remove the precious metal from old circuit boards, it said on Wednesday.
The gold is initially being used to craft jewelry and later it will be made into commemorative coins.
At the Royal Mint plant, piles of circuit boards are being fed into the new facility.
First, they are heated to remove their various components. Then the array of detached coils, capacitors, pins and transistors are sieved, sorted, sliced and diced as they move along a conveyor belt.
Anything with gold in it is set aside.
“What we’re doing here is urban mining,” says head of sustainability Inga Doak.
“We’re taking a waste product that’s being produced by society and we’re mining the gold from that waste product and starting to see the value in that finite resource.”
The gold-laden pieces go to an on-site chemical plant.
They’re tipped into a chemical solution which leaches the gold out into the liquid.
This is then filtered, leaving a powder behind. It looks pretty nondescript but this is actually pure gold – it just needs to be heated in a furnace to be transformed into a gleaming nugget.