Royal Mint Is Mining Gold From Discarded Electronics

There's gold in your old iPhone and laptop, and the British Mint is not letting it go to waste. CBS News reports that the UK's official coin maker has begun mining e-waste for gold at a new industrial plant in Wales. "What we're doing here is urban mining," Inga Doak, who heads sustainability at the Royal Mint, tells the BBC. "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."

The mint has invested in technology and infrastructure that allows it to process 4,000 printed circuit boards per year, along with old phones, TVs, and computers. That should decrease the mint's reliance on gold mined in more traditional manner, Doak tells Fast Company. Extraction in its new factory happens at room temperature, meaning it's not energy intensive, adds the mint statement.

The UN estimates that 62 million tons of e-waste are currently generated every year, but the figure is rising quickly. According to precious metals company American Bullion, the amount of gold depends on the model, but on average you'll find 0.034 grams of gold in an iPhone. Other devices, like desktop computers, contain more. While a single device's yield is pretty tiny, it adds up in all those tons of e-waste discarded every year. The recoverable materials from them are worth an estimated $62 billion—and it's estimated that e-waste contains 7% of the world's gold. (A newfangled form of plastic recycling is called "delusional.")