News in Brief

TRM Officially Launches New Factory

The Royal Mint (TRM) has officially launched its new gold recovery factory at its site in Llantrisant, South Wales. The 3,700m² facility uses world-first patented chemistry from Canadian company Excir, extracting gold from printed circuit boards (PCBs) found in everyday items, in minutes. Excir’s chemistry works at room temperature, creating a more energy efficient and cost-effective method of gold recovery.

The new factory has the capacity to process up to 4,000 tonnes of PCBs from e-waste every year, equivalent to the printed circuit boards from 1.2 million servers. It has been designed to ensure that valuable finite resources are recovered and other materials appropriately treated for onward processing.

Recovered, high purity gold will reduce the dependence on traditional mining activity and encourage more sustainable industry practices, said TRM. The Mint is already using recovered gold in its jewellery business, 886, in addition to silver recovered from medical and industry x-ray films.