U.K. mint extracts gold from e-waste: "What we're doing here is urban mining"

London - The U.K.'s Royal Mint, the country's official coinmaker, has opened a factory that will extract gold from e-waste to reduce its reliance on traditional mining and encourage more sustainable practices.

"The factory underpins our commitment to using sustainable precious metals and providing a new source of high quality, recovered gold," Sean Millard, Chief Growth Officer at The Royal Mint, said in a statement . "It allows us to reduce our reliance on mined materials and is another example of how we're working to decarbonise our operations." The Royal Mint's new factory is located in Wales and uses Canadian technology to extract gold from printed circuit boards found in items like phones, laptops and televisions.

The extraction process occurs quickly and at room temperature, so it's not energy intensive. The mint says the factory has the capacity to process 4,000 tons of printed circuit boards a year, and recovered gold is already being used in a luxury jewelry collection produced by the mint. "What we're doing here is urban mining," Inga Doak, the Royal Mint's head of sustainability, told CBS News partner network BBC News.

"We're taking a waste product that's being produced by society, and we're mining the gold from that waste product and starting to see the value in that finite resource." In a statement, the Royal Mint cited the global decline of the use of cash as a catalyst for change. Fewer people using coins means fewer people are required to make them.

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