The Royal Mint's urban mining operation in the UK is extracting more gold from old motherboards and other junk than you might think

The United Kingdom’s Royal Mint, best known for producing the country’s currency, has a new project: mining gold from electronic waste. The company has built a new industrial facility to “mine” gold from discarded electronics. The Royal Mint says the gold will first be used to make jewelry and will later be used to make commemorative coins (via BBC).

The big question, of course, is how much gold is in your old motherboards, toaster circuits and televisions. The Royal Mint estimates it can recover 450kg of gold from 4,000 tonnes of electronic waste.

At today’s price, that’s worth roughly $35 million, so it’s understandable why the Royal Mint is taking a chance.

That also represents about one part in 8,000 of gold in e-waste. Which is a lot when you think about it. That’s certainly a lot of gold to throw away when you consider the huge amounts of e-waste produced worldwide each year.

Most estimates are around 50 million tonnes. The Royal Mint probably specifically selects e-waste with relatively high gold content. So this 50 million tonnes per year probably does not imply 6,250 tonnes of gold in e-waste at the Royal Mint’s recovery rate. The world’s annual gold production is only half that figure.

But it still makes us think about how much gold is just being sent to landfills or sitting in dumps.

Of course, recovering gold is no easy feat. Traditionally, extracting gold from electronic waste has been a dubious environmental trade-off. But the Royal Mint says it has largely solved that problem.

“Traditional gold recovery processes are very energy intensive and use highly toxic chemicals that can only be used once, or they are sent to high-energy smelters and are essentially burnt,” says Leighton John, Royal Mint’s chief operating officer.

“What’s revolutionary for us is that this chemistry is used at room temperature, at very low energy, it’s recyclable and it extracts gold very quickly,” he explains.

To be frank, this is also giving the Royal Mint a headache, as the use of cash is rapidly declining in the age of ubiquitous digital and contactless payment systems. We simply don’t need as many coins as we used to.

The Royal Mint is reportedly considering recovering other metals, such as aluminium, copper, tin and steel, in the future. It is also considering turning crushed motherboards into building materials.

Right now, it’s worth wondering how much gold you have in your PC. It’s a bit more than you might think, but we’d suggest it’s probably better to boot up Baldur’s Gate 3 than to smelt it down for cash.