Electronic waste is one of the world’s fastest-growing waste streams, according to Statista market research. With e-waste generation forecast to exceed 80 million metric tons by 2030, improved recycling and recovery infrastructure is critical.

One company on a mission to help offset this trend is The Royal Mint, UK’s oldest company. 

With a contemporary sustainability ethic at the heart of a long-term strategy, the company has invested in, enhanced, and scaled a hugely promising technology used for the recovery of precious metals and other materials from e-waste.

At the start of the project, the extraction technology, developed by Canadian company Excir

only existed in a prototype form. It required further development and scaling to hit The Royal Mint’s target of 4,000 metric tons per annum. Additional technological and processing hurdles included a tightly controlled scheduling and investment.

According to Rockwell Automation UK managing director Phil Dadfield, “This was never going to be a straightforward project. We knew there were multiple challenges, some of which we could not influence, but we also knew that our highly experienced process technical team and our family of tightly integrated technologies would bring the extraction process under tighter control. Once that was established, further evolution and eventual scaling would be a little more straightforward.”

In The Royal Mint’s Precious Metal Recovery facility, circuit boards are fed via a conveyor system into a reactor and the resulting sludge then undergoes separation, sorting, and filtering using specialized chemical processes to extract molten gold and other precious metals from mixed materials, in a tightly controlled precipitation process.

The unique chemistry extracts 99% of the gold in e-waste and, more importantly, this process takes place at room temperature, rather than high-temperature smelting. The system separates out more than just precious metals. Every part of a printed circuit board can be accounted for, even the fiberglass bi-product is “de-brominated—where hazardous bromide is removed—as an integral part of the Mint’s circular economy and related net-zero plans. 

Rockwell Automation’s Lifecycle Services team delivered a complete process control solution based on the company’s PlantPAx® DCS system, which included operator workstations as well as engineer workstations. The overall system allows integration from plant floor instrumentation up to the boardroom, with contextualized reporting providing insights to drive actions for optimizing production.

PlantPAx proved ideal for this project due to its ability to scale in line with the growth and evolution of the process. It also connects disparate pieces of equipment in the complex plant and controls them in one place, using an interface familiar to the Mint’s engineers, who have worked with Rockwell Automation before.

Hadfield explains, “The system architecture enables different vendors to manufacture different parts of the plant and then easily plug it all together and give one, plant-wide infrastructure control when it's up and running. This approach eliminates disparate control systems that you often have in projects like this and provides optimization improvements, such as common log-ons, change management, alarm management, data logging and more.”

Even with the initial uncertainty and multiple process variables, engineers from all parties were delighted when the system delivered gold on the first run, at scale, and without insights from an intermediate pilot stage. According to Tony Baker, Director of Manufacturing Innovation at The Royal Mint: “After so many early challenges, we are pleased that it is all going to plan. In fact, we have already surpassed our 2024/25 target of 400 metric tons, when we hit 500 metric tons earlier this year.

For more information: 

Rockwell Automation

PlantPAx® 

The Royal Mint 

Precious Metal Recovery Factory

Excir