The Royal Mint, the UK’s official coin maker, has opened a new factory in south Wales to recover gold from e-waste, and is aiming to position itself as a leader in sustainably sourced precious metals in the UK.1 More than 50 million tonnes of electronic waste are produced globally per year, yet less than 20% of it is properly collected and recycled.2
The Royal Mint has partnered with Canadian clean tech company Excir for the gold recovery technology, and various press releases last week from the Royal Mint,1 the Guardian,3 BBC,4 etc. refer to phrases such as ‘patented new chemistry’, which, as a patent attorney, obviously piqued my interest. The Royal Mint’s website refers to a unique process to prepare circuit boards for metal extraction, which are then mixed with a ‘patented chemical formula’ for selective extraction of the gold in seconds.5
Upon brief review of Excir patents, it seems that the relevant patent family is the one deriving from WO2016/168930, entitled ‘Methods for selective leaching and extraction of precious metals in organic solvents’. Its European counterpart application EP3286346 A1 currently claims a method of leaching gold, palladium and/or platinum from a substance by contacting the substance with a mixture comprising an acid, an oxidizing agent and a solvent, and stirring under impressively mild conditions (under 2 hours at a temperature of about 20-60 °C). There are various further processing steps in the dependent claims, such as complexing the leached gold (or Pd or Pt) with a particular organic compound.
Another relevant Excir patent application could be EP4217521 A1, which covers a process for preparing an e-waste powder comprising processing e-waste particles into a slurry, extracting one or more base metal by chemical leaching, extracting one or more precious metals by chemical leaching and drying the slurry to provide the e-waste powder. The claims therein do not seem to be as focused on the chemical treatment step, however.
Irrespective of the marketing-pleasing but inaccurate reference to ‘patented technology’ when the patent has not yet granted in the UK/Europe (where the Royal Mint’s factory is based), the news is exciting because of the technology’s ability to extract a valuable material from such a problematic waste product under mild conditions and with high recovery rates (99%+).5
In addition to the clear environmental benefit of dealing with old mobile phones and laptops which would normally be shipped abroad for processing and/or disposed of by incineration or in landfill, there is a clear financial incentive for the Royal Mint to do this ‘urban mining’. The Royal Mint believes it could generate up to 450 kg of gold, worth about £27m at current prices,4 from the four thousand tonnes of e-waste it plans to process annually. The process also has the potential to recover other precious metals.
The news is also a reminder of the commercial power of patents and patent applications for licensing technology to an established manufacturer. In this case, the construction of a new processing plant which will yield millions of pounds worth of gold a year came about as a result of a start-up in Canada (Excir) patenting their technology and licensing it to one of the oldest companies in the world (the Royal Mint, which is 1,100 years old).
1: New Factory Extracting Gold from E-Waste Unveiled by The Royal Mint | The Royal Mint
3: Royal Mint opens factory in south Wales to recover gold from e-waste | Wales | The Guardian
4: Royal Mint: UK’s coin maker turning e-waste into gold – BBC News