e-waste recovery via prisoner workshops and Royal Mint

The initiative aims to create employment and skills development opportunities for prisoners in supervised work programmes.

e-waste recovery

Circuit boards are first dismantled at Recycling Lives’ facility in Preston, Lancashire. And are then sent to Royal Mint’s centre in Llantrisant, South Wales. This will then extract the gold and other precious metals.

Each batch of circuit boards is graded, itemised and verified by Recycling Lives prior to dispatch. This ensures full traceability and the consistent material quality required for precious metal recovery, say the organisations.

“Recycling Lives plays a vital role in supporting our precious metals recovery work,” said Sean Millard, Chief Growth Officer at The Royal Mint.

“We’re proud to work with such a specialised recycling business. Their feedstock has enabled us to continue sourcing high-quality precious metals from e-waste across the UK, while their social impact model adds further value to a partnership advancing a more circular economy.”

Valuable materials

For its part, Recycling Lives Services highlighted the positive impact for prisoners.

“By working with The Royal Mint’s Reformation Metals team, Recycling Lives Services is recovering valuable materials from UK e-waste,” said Adrian Murphy, the organisation’s CEO. “[This is while] supporting a rehabilitation model that creates practical routes towards employment for prisoners preparing for release,” .

“The Royal Mint’s commitment to ethical precious metals recovery helps make that model possible, connecting circular economy innovation with meaningful second chances.”

Llantrisant

Up to 4,000 tonnes of PCBs, from e-waste recovery, can be processed by The Royal Mint annually. The post-processing phase also allows for the appropriate sorting of plastic elements.

As mentioned, the 3,700 square metre facility is in Llantrisant, South Wales. This is about six miles from the Sony plant, incidentally, that produces the Raspberry Pi for Farnell.

The Royal Mint is using patented techniques created by Excir, a Canadian clean-tech company.

See also: Picture of the Day – Royal Mint recovering gold from electronic waste