The British Royal Mint has taken an initiative to turn old laptops and mobile phones into Gold. This is supposed to be the World's first successful recycling factory.
This facility will be the first in the world to extract gold from thrown away circuit boards of laptops and mobile phones, reports BBC.
The quality of the extracted gold is supposed to be quite high and would be utilised by the Royal Mint at its palace in Llantrisant, which is located in the South of Wales. It is expected that about 90 tonnes of British Circuit Boards will be processed per week, which in turn will result in hundreds of kilograms of gold.
As per The Daily Mail, Sean Millard, Chief Growth Officer at the Royal Mint said,
“Working with our partners Excir, we have introduced world-first technology to the UK capable of recovering precious metals from electronic waste in seconds."
When it comes to the overall environmental impact of the decision, it will be a revolution according to Mr Millard. He narrated to the Daily Mail,
"This approach is revolutionary and offers huge potential to reuse our planet’s precious resources, reduce the environmental footprint of electronic waste and create new jobs. We estimate that 99 per cent of the UK’s circuit boards are currently shipped overseas to be processed at high temperatures in smelters."
The technology of the procedure has been created in Canada and it is supposed to get back as much as 99 per cent of the usable metals from the waste which was headed for the scrap heap.
This is also supposed to be a new horizon in the field of employment as around 40 jobs will be open for highly qualified chemists and engineers when the scheme opens next year.
This initiative taken by Royal Mint is the first of its kind and will create an example for countries when it comes to recycling old laptops and mobile phones to extract and use precious metals like gold.
