Royal Mint: New technology recycling gold from electronic waste

Every year, millions of tonnes of electronic waste including old laptops, mobile phones and televisions are thrown away.

However, The Royal Mint - whose job it is to make coins for the UK - has come up with a unique way to turn these items, which are collectively known as e-waste, into something valuable.

It has started using new state-of-the-art technology to recover gold from recycled electronic products.

This involves taking the circuit boards from old mobiles and computers and extracting the precious metal by putting the boards through several important processes involving chemistry and very high temperatures.

At the moment, the the Royal Mint is focusing on extracting gold from e-waste, but it hopes to recover a number of other metals including copper, silver, tin and nickel.

What is e-waste?

More than 50 million tonnes of e-waste - that's waste from old electronics products - is produced worldwide each year and it's hoped this technology could help tackle that.

Less than 20% of e-waste is currently recycled worldwide, with precious metals valued at an estimated £41 billion largely thrown out.

Mountains of e-waste get sent to landfill or sent abroad to be processed at high temperatures in smelters.

Experts believe that as much as 7% of the world's gold may be held in e-waste, with 100 times more gold in a tonne of e-waste than in a tonne of gold ore.

Gold ore is gold in its natural state mixed with other metals and minerals in the rock before it gets separated out.