<
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230904-how-the-royal-mint-is-turning-electronic-waste-into-gold>
'Through security, equipped with a pair of safety glasses and a white lab coat,
I'm taken behind the scenes at the Royal Mint near Cardiff, South Wales – a
place that's world-renowned for making billions of coins for more than 30
nations. For two years, the Royal Mint, the UK's official coin producer, has
been developing a mysterious new way to recover metals from electronic waste.
As I walk into her small demo laboratory, Hayley Messenger, a chemist
specialising in sustainable precious metals, explains why nothing here is
labelled: "Everything is a secret!" she says, pouring a '"magic green solution"
into a one-litre-capacity (35oz) glass flask of fragmented circuit boards.
She and a team of chemists and chemical analysts, together with Canadian
start-up Excir, have invented and patented a clean, energy-efficient way which
they claim extracts 99% of gold from the printed circuit boards found inside
discarded laptops and old mobile phones. Later this year, the Royal Mint is
opening a new multi-million-pound factory which will be able to process 90
tonnes of circuit boards per week once fully operational, recovering hundreds
of kilogrammes of gold every year.
When the luminous mixture starts to fizz, Messenger screws the lid on, then
places the flask on a tumbling machine to shake the contents. In just four
minutes, any gold dissolves and leaches out into the liquid.
"This all happens at room temperature and it's very quick," says Messenger who
explains that this chemical solution gets reused up to 20 times, with the
concentration of dissolved gold increasing each time.
When another mystery solution is added, the gold becomes solid metal again.
This powder is filtered out and melted down in a furnace into thumbnail-sized
nuggets. These nuggets can then be crafted into pendant necklaces, earrings and
cufflinks. But the real beauty of these recycled precious metals lies in the
scalability of this super streamlined chemical process.'
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-child-poverty-leprosy-conservation-california/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
