The Royal Mint and the problem with recycling
News that the Royal Mint it to process mobile phones for their gold content:
The Royal Mint has unveiled a “pioneering” factory that will recover gold from electronic waste, creating a more sustainable source of the precious metal for the coin manufacturer’s luxury jewellery line.
The factory in south Wales, which has been under construction since March 2022, is designed to extract gold from up to 4,000 tonnes a year of circuit boards sourced in the UK from electronics including phones, laptops and TVs.
This isn’t wholly new of course. One of us worked on such programmes back in the 1990s when there was a lot more gold in them thar hills of electronics. But this is not to sneer or anything (the “new” is what looks like an interestingly useful new process to do it) but to use it as an example to explain the recycling problem:
It is estimated that about 600 mobile phones will have to be processed to create one of the 7.5g gold rings sold in the 886 collection, which are similar to the weight of a £1 coin.
There will also be a little tin from the solder, copper from the circuit boards and so on but the vast, vast, majority of the revenue will come from the gold. And that’s worth, well, maybe £1 per ‘phone? If there are tens of millions of old phones per year (sounds about right) then that’s money to be thought about, obviously.
But the processing of the ‘phone (or other electronics) isn’t the major cost here. It’s the collection of the ‘phones. And this is always true of any recycling process.
It often is true that a pile of 10,000 tonnes of something (or 10 million pieces etc) is worth feeding into a factory to recycle out the minerals and or metals. But also that creating the pile of 10,000 tonnes (or 10 million etc) costs vastly more than the value of those metals.
For example, the Royal Mint will not give you 50p for that old ‘phone at the back of the third drawer down. But might well be prepared to offer 50p each for 10,000 pieces delivered their plant (No, we don’t know but the logic is obvious, yes?).
Which is why recycling schemes always need to concentrate on the major cost to them - the collection into the pile at the factory of the things to be recycled. Not doing so is why EU regulations (gold plated here at home of course) killed the extant lead acid battery recycling scheme. The costs of collection were such that the £5 of lead in each one was only worth 50p at the garage when picked up. Regulation started to insist on a £25 document for the movement of used lead acid batteries. That kills the economics even though the factory to do the processing existed and was, in fact, gasping for stock (the Chief Buyer for that factory was met by one of us at a conference in Russia in fact, so far he had to go to try to replace his feedstock).
As we’ve said many a time we’ve absolutely delighted when people do economic recycling. It makes us all as a society richer. But the economic part of it has to concentrate on the collection costs because that’s where all the major costs are.
Tim Worstall