Britain’s Royal Mint to turn trash to treasure by recovering gold from discarded electronics

Britain’s Royal Mint plans to start recycling at scale discarded cellphones and laptops to extract precious metals, including gold and silver, embedded within.

Small quantities of precious metals are embedded in circuit boards and other electronic hardware that are part of a growing pile of gadgets cast away globally each year. A record 53.6 million tons of electronic waste was generated worldwide in 2019, according to the United Nations. Less than 20 percent of that waste was recycled — resulting in around $57 billion worth of precious metals being thrown away.