U.K. mint extracts gold from e-waste: "What we're doing here is urban mining"

U.K. Royal Mint mining gold from e-waste

U.K. Royal Mint mining gold from e-waste 01:41

London - The U.K.'s Royal Mint, the country's official coinmaker, has opened a factory that will extract gold from e-waste to reduce its reliance on traditional mining and encourage more sustainable practices.

"The factory underpins our commitment to using sustainable precious metals and providing a new source of high quality, recovered gold," Sean Millard, Chief Growth Officer at The Royal Mint, said in a statement. "It allows us to reduce our reliance on mined materials and is another example of how we're working to decarbonise our operations."

The new factory at The Royal Mint, where they are sustainably recovering precious metals from printed circuit boards and turning them into gold and stunning jewelry.  Tom Wren / Royal Mint handout

The Royal Mint's new factory is located in Wales and uses Canadian technology to extract gold from printed circuit boards found in items like phones, laptops and televisions. The extraction process occurs quickly and at room temperature, so it's not energy intensive. The mint says the factory has the capacity to process 4,000 tons of printed circuit boards a year, and recovered gold is already being used in a luxury jewelry collection produced by the mint.

"What we're doing here is urban mining," Inga Doak, the Royal Mint's head of sustainability, told CBS News partner network BBC News. "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."

In a statement, the Royal Mint cited the global decline of the use of cash as a catalyst for change. Fewer people using coins means fewer people are required to make them.

"We are not only preserving finite precious metals for future generations, but we are also preserving the expert craftmanship The Royal Mint is famous for creating new jobs and reskilling opportunities for our employees," Jessopp said.

According to the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, the generation of e-waste is rising by 2.6 million ton annually. Less than a quarter of that waste is properly collected and recycled, "leaving $ 62 billion worth of recoverable natural resources unaccounted for and increasing pollution risks to communities worldwide."

"The new factory offers a more sustainable solution to this growing environmental challenge," the Royal Mint said. "It has been designed to ensure that valuable finite resources are recovered, and other materials are appropriately treated for onward processing."