UK Royal Mint To Extract Gold From E-Waste (bbc.co.uk) 48
"The Royal Mint, which has produced coins since the 9th Century, has begun to recover gold from electronic waste as the use of cash has declined and fewer new coins are needed," writes Slashdot reader newcastlejon. "In 2022, construction began on a new site in Llantrisant, Wales. This facility will now be used to initially produce gold for jewelry and later for commemorative coins." The BBC reports: 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. 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. "Traditional gold recovery processes are very energy intensive and use very toxic chemicals that can only be used once, or they go to high energy smelters and they're basically burnt," says Leighton John, the Royal Mint's operations director. "The groundbreaking thing for us is the fact that this chemistry is used at room temperature, at very low energy, it's recyclable and pulls gold really quickly."
"Our aim is to process over 4,000 tonnes of e-waste annually," says Leighton John. "Traditionally this waste is shipped overseas but we're keeping it in the UK and we're keeping those elements in the UK for us to use. It's really important."
The report notes that the UK is the second biggest producer of tech trash per capita, beaten only by Norway. According to the UN, e-waste is a rapidly growing problem, with 62 million tons discarded in 2022. That's expected to increase by a third by 2030.
"Our aim is to process over 4,000 tonnes of e-waste annually," says Leighton John. "Traditionally this waste is shipped overseas but we're keeping it in the UK and we're keeping those elements in the UK for us to use. It's really important."
The report notes that the UK is the second biggest producer of tech trash per capita, beaten only by Norway. According to the UN, e-waste is a rapidly growing problem, with 62 million tons discarded in 2022. That's expected to increase by a third by 2030.
Old British joke (Score:2)
Polo mints [wikipedia.org] are known as "the mint with the hole". Llantrisant has been called "the hole with the Mint".
yields? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
What will they do with the remaining waste?
Ship it off to some 3rd world country, mainly because China won't take the garbage anymore
Another anti-poor article (Score:3)
>as the use of cash has declined and fewer new coins are needed
and from 2023: https://brc.org.uk/news/corpor... [brc.org.uk] -- "Cash usage grew for the first time in a decade, rising to 19% of all transactions (from 15% in 2021). This reflects a choice by many households to use cash to budget more carefully during the onset of the cost of living crisis, as well as a natural return to cash usage following the move to contactless during Covid. Card payments were used for 76% of transactions (83% in 2021), with debit c
Re: (Score:2)
The comparison is to 2021, which hit an all time low of cash transactions due to covid - a combination of less in person transactions, fear over the cleanliness of cash and the possibility of covid transmission via cash.
Overall there's still a decline, covid caused a blip.
No matter how poor you are in the UK, you are still legally entitled to a bank account with a debit card, you're just unlikely to be offered any credit facility so you're still limited to whatever your balance is. Cash doesn't make it easi
Re:Another anti-poor article (Score:5, Interesting)
Cash doesn't make it harder to budget. It makes it much more obvious: you have to choose to go pull 200 clams out of the ATM, and it's obvious how much is left in your wallet. You don't have to run a mental tally or compare your bank balance to a target threshold for the day. Waving a card makes the transfer and your current balance invisible.
Re: (Score:2)
That reminds me of a friend from the '80s back when credit cards were imprinted onto the credit slip by sliding the handle of the imprinter over it. We were all fresh out of high school and he was facing a credit card balance higher than he expected.
With cash, you see it leave your wallet and go over the counter. With a check you have to do the subtraction in the check register and you see the balance going down. With credit, you just sign your name. The imprinter should have a pad where you have to put you
Re: (Score:2)
That's credit, which is different.
People have been unable to budget since long before credit cards existed, they would spend all of their cash and then have nothing so they couldn't even afford to eat. That's where "payday loans" came from, and they would borrow money to pay back (plus exorbitant interest) when they next got paid.
If they had budgeted properly they would have paid less overall since they wouldn't have paid the interest.
With a credit card you already have the loan agreed so it happens automat
Re: (Score:2)
I know the difference between a credit and a debit card. I also understand that there are similarities as well. One of those similarities is that some people find it easy to spend more than they realized because they don't see the balance going down or the wallet getting flatter.
Re: (Score:2)
Come on, it's 2024... Everyone has a smartphone with mobile banking so you can see immediately exactly how much you've spent and how much you've got left.
Most mobile banking apps also keep track of your monthly expenditure, compares it to other months and will warn if you're going over budget. No mental tally needed, the bank's app does all this for you.
Cash makes it harder and less convenient, you take that money out the ATM but how do you remember whats in the account? Do you count out how much change you
Re: (Score:2)
Cash usage is lower than ever.
I am a small business owner. We are happy to take your money any way we can get it, but... entire days go by - sometimes several in a row- without a single customer paying in cash. Anecdotal -yes, but an actual boots-on-the-ground observation of reality.
People use cash a lot less often than they used to do. It is a fact. Your feeling that this is somehow "anti-poor" does not change that fact.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
He used to get excited each day when he got to go to work: He was non verbal, but full of energy.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
If my math is correct, that works out to 112.5 g/t, which would be exceptionally high grade [investopedia.com] if it were a traditional mine.
Of course the process of separating the gold from the other components of e-waste is different than separating gold from the material found in ordinary mines; but this is still a very rich "discovery" by comparison, which should mitigate such difficulties.
Re: (Score:2)
Article sez, "As well as recovering gold, the company is also looking at what to do with all of the other materials that it is separating out from the circuit boards. They contain a number of different materials including aluminium, copper, tin and steel. They’re also investigating whether ground up boards could be used by the construction industry."
I wonder whether, in a properly circular economy, companies making physical goods would be made to source their materials from the waste of others, and fi
Re: (Score:2)
You've got to remember thermodynamics. Nothing is free (though sunlight sure comes close).
Evolution has spent a LONG time optimizing the biological cycle. The technical cycle isn't nearly as efficient. (I want to say "yet", but can't quite bring myself to believe that.)
So when people talk about "the circular economy" realize that it's going to require energy inputs and produce unusable waste. What you can do is try to minimize those, but you can't eliminate them.
Re: (Score:2)
Copper isn't nearly as valuable per gram as gold, but there's a lot more of it in a board and it's fairly easy to chemically process. It's valuable enough to have several dipshits a year fry themselves trying to steal it from substations.
Re: (Score:2)
Gold-from-the-ground mines work with ores in the single-digit grams per ton range, so that's probably a good floor value to work with.
For perspective, a sim card has about 10 milligrams of gold in and on it, mostly in the plating on the exterior. A pound of card edge connectors, the strip that plugs into a PCI or AGP slot cut off of the boards for leaching, contains about a gram of gold per pound of connectors. More for older or aerospace kit, less for newer or consumer kit.
I assume they'll separate and l
Dumpster diving? (Score:1)
How far has Brittania fallen? Is there no place left they can colonize and get free stuff from?
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
"The Royal Mint, which has produced coins since the 9th Century, has begun to recover gold from electronic waste as the use of cash has declined and fewer new coins are needed,"
Re:Dumpster diving? (Score:4, Informative)
Not really.
I mean it's a bit of contextual information really. The Royal Mint has been in the business of sourcing gold for over a thousand years. It's a bit of general interest very closely adjacent to the story. People often to that in writing to broaden the interest of a piece without losing much. And since when are nerds not interested in collecting obscure facts?
Re: Dumpster diving? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
How far has Brittania fallen?
They must have run out of gold fillings from pensioners to extract.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, there is a missing hard drive with a massive bitcoin cache on it somewhere.
It's not that much. (Score:2)
In the big scheme gold leaf is really disposable. Only exception is cutting fingers from circuit boards. Your better of panning for gold.
Coins (Score:2)
"the use of cash has declined and fewer new coins are needed,"
I didn't think the UK would still be minting Gold coins, at least not for use in cash circulation. For collectors maybe.
But I suppose there is a demand from numismatists for proof sets with Charlie's head on, but more likely silver than gold.
Re: (Score:3)
They mint Britannias and Sovereigns for investors who want to hold physical gold.
Re:Coins (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't think the UK would still be minting Gold coins
They are!
For collectors maybe.
Here's a fun fact for you about tax law in the UK. You don't pay capital gains tax on cash. Normally this is an obvious truism because the face value of money doesn't change. But gold coins have a specified weight of gold, not a face value, but they are cash.
So if you hold money in gold coins, they will not contribute positively or negatively to your capital gains/losses. This only applies to actual minted coins of the legally valid denominations. Lumps o' gold otherwise are assets treated in the usual way.
So, they're a hedge against inflation, if the currency devalues a bunch, then the gold will keep its value on the global scale regardless of the utterly insane fiscal policies the government might try, and won't be taxed.
So there you go. Now you know a tiny bit more about an obscure point of tax law in a country you don't live in.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for the info! I'd always wondered where gold coins came in, and why people keep making them.
So the idea is that a 1000 pound sterling coin (would that be around an ounce of gold these days? Let's say it is just for discussion) is just 1000 pounds, and so cannot be taxed. But if that coin is worth 1200 pounds, in gold, in the future, you've made money (pun intended).
Downside is, that 1000 pound coin is not going to cost you only 1000 pounds from the mint. No, they'll have a markup, and you'll like
Re: (Score:2)
For the special issue new ones, sure.
But you can get older ones for a smaller markup. You can't get them from anyone for the spot price of gold, but you can't get any investment from anyone for the spot price. They're are always brokerage fees
Re: (Score:2)
I think the point is that the Mint has some "spare capacity" as it doesn't have as many coins to make (apparently it's not making any more 1p or 2p coins at all).
Whilst there has been a decline in the use of cash, it's actually a lot less than you'd imagine. We've had an awful lot of inflation though, so 1p, 2p and possibly even 5p price differences really aren't "important" any more. We could probably round every price to the nearest 10p and we'd still be just fine. That would be a world less coins in circ
I miss OGG THE CAVEMAN. (Score:1)
KRUHFT BREAK MP3 ON PLAN9 SOURCES!
Why just the gold? (Score:1)
Just put it all in an industrial press and cut coins from that.
Excuse me, my good man (Score:4, Funny)
I wish to complain about this gold coin what I purchased not half an hour ago at this very mint.
It seems to be a bit of circuit board covered in gold leaf.
It may be stiff, but it ain't legal tender.
Re:Excuse me, my good man (Score:4, Funny)
By weight, %1 of 1% of e-waste is pure gold (Score:2)
Neat! ..."
"Four thousand tonnes of e-waste should generate up to 450kg of gold
What chemical solution? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think I read about one a decade or so ago that used microbes. I don't know how well it worked. (Or even whether it really did.)
Re: What chemical solution? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"The company [Excir] got a funding boost in 2018 after appearing on “Dragons’ Den”- a CBC Television show similar to “Shark Tank” in the U.S. – and winning over $700,000. "
Re: (Score:2)
This seems interesting: "The company [Excir] got a funding boost in 2018 after appearing on "Dragons' Den" - a CBC Television show similar to "Shark Tank" in the U.S. -- and winning over $700,000. "
So they are using Piranha solution?
Re: (Score:2)
I hope they extract other valuable materials too (Score:1)