https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6p2k11e41po
"The Royal Mint, maker of the UK's coins, has begun processing electronic waste
to extract gold from it.
The company has built a large industrial plant on its site in Llantrisant in
Wales to remove the precious metal from old circuit boards.
The gold is initially being used to craft jewellery and later it will be made
into commemorative coins.
E-waste, which includes anything from old phones and computers to TVs, is a
rapidly growing problem - the UN says 62m tonnes were thrown away in 2022.
Its latest report estimates that the mountain of discarded tech is set to
increase by about a third by 2030.
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.”"
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
