A fresh approach to e-waste at The Royal Mint

In 1848, gold was discovered in California, and by spring the following year 40,000 miners had flocked to the then sleepy and little-known backwater town. These prospectors were seeking their fortune, and their journey west was one of personal gain and peril. My drive down to South Wales, wet and treacherous as it may have been, was nowhere near as dangerous, and it wasn’t for gold, sadly.

But there is something of a modern day gold rush happening behind the walls of the factory I visited in Llantrisant. And it’s a lot more profitable and ethical than the one that took place in the mid-1800s. It’s also happening because, yet again, one of the UK’s magnificent manufacturers is trying to solve a problem. Think of it more as a rush to action, rather than a rush for gold.

A record 62 million tonnes of e-waste was produced in 2022, up 82% from 2010. And this is set to rise another 32% to 82 million tonnes by 2030. Staggering numbers, making e-waste the world’s fastest growing waste stream. While this is a global issue, the UK more than plays its part in making this such a growing problem. Households across the country are holding on to 880 million unused electrical items and throwing away 103,000 tonnes of waste. We are the second worst offender in the world with 24kg per capita.

This makes for sorry reading. And with most waste circuit boards taken from phones and laptops, leaving the UK for Europe and Asia to be smelted at high temperatures, it’s the sort of thing that makes me cynically think to myself: ‘I’m glad I recycled that bit of plastic the other day. What’s the point, eh?

Breaking down the boards

However, my visit to The Royal Mint helped to cure any cynicism I may have been feeling, and it made me more optimistic, because here we have a process that is making a difference. Some circuit boards aren’t being flown thousands of miles to be incinerated; some find their way to Llantrisant.

Before visiting this factory, it never occurred to me what actually goes into a circuit board. While I knew they included metals, I wasn’t aware just how much (and how precious). The most common within circuit boards are gold, aluminium, copper, silver and steel. Not all of these elements are easy to see, but at least one can always be found on a board. On average, one tonne of circuit boards produces 165gm of gold, equating to around £9,000. This plant has the capacity to process up to 4,000 tonnes of printed circuit boards from e-waste every year.

It’s not going to eradicate the yearly UK total of 103,000 tonnes of waste overnight, nor should one company bare that responsibility. But it’s a start, and increased capacity is being explored as part of the project’s next phase. As you enter the precious metals recovery plant, a multimillion pound investment, you stand face-to-face with a long, tall, multi sectioned, multi-coloured, tubular shaped reactor.

The circuit boards are stored in large bin-like containers and then fed via a conveyor system into the reactor. The boards then begin a process where they’re reverse engineered, ensuring that their various materials are separated into groups.

“This process starts a lot like your rubbish at home – you’re always encouraged to split things out”, explained Leighton John, Director of Operations at The Royal Mint. “The more you separate, the easier it is to recycle. But the problem with electronic circuit boards is they’re designed to be manufactured as quickly possible – zero thought goes into taking them apart. So, we’ve had to solve that problem.”

It takes some pretty impressive technology to remove all the components from these boards. Don’t try this at home in the hope of getting your hands on some gold; you won’t be able to. You’re more likely to melt your hands off before they’re able to touch anything precious. The Royal Mint is able to safely retrieve and recycle gold and other precious metals from electronic waste with the help of Canadian cleantech start-up Excir.

The gold-rich components are sent to the chemical processing line, where gold is extracted from the circuit boards within minutes via a liquid process called leaching. The leached gold is then removed from the liquid solution via precipitation and filtration. This results in a gold powder, which is further refined and melted in a furnace at approximately 1,100°C, to create an ingot with a purity of 999.9.

“This is world first technology; it doesn’t exist anywhere else,” said Leighton. I was also told that the engineers at The Royal Mint had designed the layout of the entire plant, with the help of augmented and virtual reality. Even more remarkably, they built the reactor. This goes to show, if you weren’t already aware, just what engineers are capable of when they’re presented with a task.

It takes approximately 600 mobile phones to create one 886 by The Royal Mint rings, weighing approx. 7.5g – a similar weight to a £1 coin

Golden oldies

The Royal Mint first started making coins 1,100 years ago, when Alfred the Great began issuing coins with his effigy. This technically makes The Royal Mint the UK’s oldest company. In Alfred’s time, coins were made out of gold and silver, and were people’s only form of currency. In the time of King Charles III, we don’t use coins as much as we used to – if at all.

The way people transact is changing, and since the COVID pandemic, there has been a global drop in the usage and circulation of coins. Due to this, only a few weeks of the year are dedicated to the manufacture of new coins. “Recovering precious metals is now at the heart of what we do,” said Leighton. “Once all the precious metals have been removed from the circuit boards, the gold goes into a solution, the solution is treated and we drop out the gold. This is all done at room temperature, and the chemistry is recycled.”

Traditional gold refining is in complete contrast to this process. It uses heat and multiple hazardous chemicals. It tends to be a “one shot chemistry,” as Leighton puts it, meaning the chemicals are only used once and then thrown away. The chemistry at The Royal Mint however, can be recycled between ten and 20 times in some cases. In addition, when gold is mined from the ground, it’s 10,000 times more carbon intensive than the recycling process.

The gold that gets extracted is also used in another part of the organisation, which is The Royal Mint’s 886 business – a nod to the year the company was founded. “We’re trying to enhance British craftsmanship,” said Leighton. “We’ve created new jobs by taking e-waste gold and turning it into jewellery. When you buy jewellery from the Royal Mint, you’re buying something that comes from a massively sustainable source which also has 1,100 years of history behind it.”

And it’s not just the gold that is of interest. As mentioned, every element is stripped and separated from the circuit board. Once the precious metals have been taken off, they are crushed into different sizes. They then go through multiple sorting techniques and are separated into their own concentrates, which can then be sent to other companies as a raw material to turn them into products such as sheets/ bars/rods to manufacture new products.

Essentially, the non-precious metals that are recovered – copper, tin, steel, aluminium, etc. are put back into the manufacturing supply chain. “The entire circuit board is recycled then?” I asked Leighton. “Not quite,” he replied. “But our ambition is to recycle 100% of the board over the next three to five years.”

Traditional gold refining tends to be a one shot chemistry. Here it can be recycled between 10 and 20 times in some cases

COINtinuous improvement

As mentioned, the manufacture of UK coins has been on a centuries long journey. In 1279, The Royal Mint sat within the Tower of London, and for hundreds of years, English coins were struck by hand. The minting process in England wasn’t mechanised until the early 1660s. Metal was cast into fillets and reduced by a horse-powered rolling mill, and blanks were punched with a small fly press. Striking took place using a simple screw press, at a rate of one every two seconds. The resulting coins were thicker and vastly superior in quality to those struck by hammer.

Then came the introduction of steam power, and The Royal Mint moved to a new purpose-built factory at nearby Tower Hill. By 1810, this facility was able to accommodate eight massive steam presses which stood in the coining press room, and were capable of striking around 60 coins a minute. At the turn of the 20th century, steam power gave way to electrification and master tools were increasingly produced using reducing machines.

Instead of engraving by hand, at size in steel, an artist was now able to prepare a larger plaster model. A mould was then taken and electroplated with nickel and copper, yielding a reproduction known as an electrotype that could be mounted on an engraving machine and scanned. These movements were communicated to a rotating cutter, which copied them at coin size into a block of steel. Production moved to South Wales in 1968, where the modern day process is now quite mature.

Today, dies created using a digital file are taken from a scan of a plaster model, which is fed into a computer-aided engraving machine. There is still a coining press area of the facility, but the large stream presses are obviously no longer required. Forklift trucks tip crates of blanks into hoppers, which are fed into the coining press. The dial plate brings each blank to rest on top of the lower die, which moves upwards, pushing the blank into a restraining collar against the upper die with a pressure of around 60 tonnes.

A modern coining press can strike up to 850 coins a minute. From hammer to CAD; that is this country’s coin making story so far. As mentioned however, the need for coins is dwindling. And when I visited The Royal Mint, the coining presses were unmanned. The company will always manufacture coins, but it no longer requires a 250-strong workforce to do so. Which begs the question, where have these people gone?

“One of the key issues for us as a management team was making sure we sustained employment,” said Leighton, earnestly. “We’ve managed to find new homes for people in other parts of the business. Someone who was operating a coining press six months ago, is now making a piece of jewellery. And that’s a skill that they can use for the rest of their lives.”

“That transition was easy then?,” I asked.

“Yes, it’s been great,” said Leighton. “We’ve put a lot of hard work into this; when moving people into new areas, we’ve taking them on taster sessions, and spent time with them to make the transition as easy as possible.

“Some of these people have worked in the same area for 30 years. Just coming into work and turning left instead of right is a significant change for some people, so we’ve tried to make that as easy as we possibly can.”

Out of around 250 people that are no longer required on coining presses, The Royal Mint says that no redundancies have been made. Right on the money With such a long and illustrious history, this is a company that has witnessed great change. As you would expect in a company that has manufactured products since 886, processes have evolved. But it’s in more recent years that change has really accelerated.

“I’ve been in the business since I was an apprentice at 16”, said Leighton. “And, I’ve seen huge change in my time here. We’ve moved from a traditional civil service organisation through to a modern, innovative manufacturing business.”

In that time, The Royal Mint has made Olympic medals. It has recoined 1.4 billion pound coins – the company’s first large scale recycling project. It has also made two million visors for the NHS from a standing start, in response to COVID, having never made them before. And now, with coin circulation decreasing, its 886 business is making jewellery and commemorative coins from e-waste. In almost every instance, the change has come in response to a problem – e-waste being one of these as the demand for electrical products soars among consumers.

Research from Material Focus found that the materials contained inside all held on to, discarded or illegally exported or stolen electrical items are worth £927m. We’re talking about an economy contributing amount of money here – which it would be if all these items were recycled. The Royal Mint is a company that wants to do more. And if this spirit of progress and innovation continues, it will.