E-waste is mounting. Now the UK Royal Mint has found a new way to extract the precious metals hidden in laptops and phones to reduce our reliance on raw materials.

电子废弃物在不断增加。现在，英国皇家造币厂发现了一种新方法来提炼隐藏在笔记本电脑和手机中的贵金属，以减少我们对原材料的依赖。

Through security, equipped with a pair of safety glasses and a white lab coat, I'm taken behind the scenes at the Royal Mint near Cardiff, South Wales – a place that's world-renowned for making billions of coins for more than 30 nations. For two years, the Royal Mint, the UK's official coin producer, has been developing a mysterious new way to recover metals from electronic waste.

我经过安检，戴着防护眼镜，穿着实验室白大褂，进入位于南威尔士卡迪夫附近的皇家造币厂的内部——这个地方为30 多个国家铸造数十亿枚硬币而闻名于世。两年来，这家英国官方的皇家造币厂都在研发一种神秘的新方法，从电子废弃物中回收金属。

As I walk into her small demo laboratory, Hayley Messenger, a chemist specialising in sustainable precious metals, explains why nothing here is labelled: "Everything is a secret!" she says, pouring a '"magic green solution" into a one-litre-capacity (35oz) glass flask of fragmented circuit boards.

当我走进她的小型演示实验室时，专门从事可持续贵金属研究的化学家海莉·梅辛杰介绍了这里为什么看不到任何标签：“一切都是机密！” 她一边说，一边将“神奇的绿色溶液”倒入容量为一升（35盎司）的玻璃烧瓶中，里面装有电路板碎片。

She and a team of chemists and chemical analysts, together with Canadian start-up Excir, have invented and patented a clean, energy-efficient way which they claim extracts 99% of gold from the printed circuit boards found inside discarded laptops and old mobile phones. Later this year, the Royal Mint is opening a new multi-million-pound factory which will be able to process 90 tonnes of circuit boards per week once fully operational, recovering hundreds of kilogrammes of gold every year.

她和一个由化学家和化学分析师组成的团队，以及加拿大初创公司 Excir 发明了一种清洁、节能的方法并申请了专利，他们声称这种方法可以从废旧的笔记本电脑和手机的印刷电路板中提炼99%的黄金。今年晚些时候，英国皇家造币厂将开设一家耗资数百万英镑的新工厂，全面运营后，每周可加工 90 吨电路板，每年可回收数百公斤黄金。
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When the luminous mixture starts to fizz, Messenger screws the lid on, then places the flask on a tumbling machine to shake the contents. In just four minutes, any gold dissolves and leaches out into the liquid.

当发光的混合物开始嘶嘶作响时，梅辛杰拧上瓶盖，然后将烧瓶放在翻滚机上摇晃里面的物质。只需四分钟，所有的黄金就会溶解并浸出到溶液中。

"This all happens at room temperature and it's very quick," says Messenger who explains that this chemical solution gets reused up to 20 times, with the concentration of dissolved gold increasing each time.

梅辛杰说：“这一切都在室温下进行，而且速度非常快”。据她透露，这种化学溶液可重复使用多达 20 次，每次溶解的黄金浓度都会增加。

When another mystery solution is added, the gold becomes solid metal again. This powder is filtered out and melted down in a furnace into thumbnail-sized nuggets. These nuggets can then be crafted into pendant necklaces, earrings and cufflixs. But the real beauty of these recycled precious metals lies in the scalability of this super streamlined chemical process.

当添加另一种神秘溶液时，黄金重新变成固体金属。将这些黄金粉末过滤出来，并在熔炉中形成极小的金块，然后将这些金块制成吊坠项链、耳环、袖扣。但这些回收贵金属的真正魅力在于，这种高超的流线型化学生产工艺具有可推广性。
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The Royal Mint has patented a chemical process to extract gold from circuit boards found inside discarded laptops and old mobile phones

英国皇家造币厂申请了一项化学工艺专利，从废弃的笔记本电脑和旧手机的电路板中提炼黄金。

A chemical solution

化学溶液
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E-waste (also known as waste electrical and electronic equipment or WEEE) is the world's fastest-growing waste stream. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, an estimated 50 million tonnes of e-waste is produced globally every year, weighing more than all of the commercial airliners ever made. But only 20% of that is formally recycled, and most gets thrown away and either sent to landfill or incinerated. Last year a study by price comparison service USwitch found that the UK produced the second largest amount of e-waste per person, with Norway ranking top and the US in eighth position.

电子废弃物（又称报废的电子电气设备）是世界上增长最快的废物流。根据联合国环境规划署的数据，全球每年产生约5000万吨电子垃圾，比有史以来制造的所有商用客机的重量还重。但其中只有 20% 被正式回收，大部分都被扔掉，要么被送往垃圾填埋场，要么被焚烧。去年，比价服务提供商 USwitch 的一项研究发现，英国人均电子废弃物的产量位居世界第二，挪威排名第一，美国第八。

As demand for more portable devices and fast electronics grows, so too will the e-waste mountain. In 2019, the World Economic Forum estimated that by 2050, annual e-waste production will more than double to 120 million tonnes.

随着人们对便携式设备和快速电子产品的需求不断增长，电子废弃物也将堆积如山。2019年，世界经济论坛预计到2050年，电子废弃物的年产量将增加一倍以上，达到1.2亿吨。

Like all critical raw materials, gold is a finite resource, yet 7% of the world's gold is currently sitting in disused electronics. Gold extraction usually involves exporting devices to the EU or Asia where e-waste is smelted down at extremely high temperatures in a very crude and carbon-intensive process.

与所有的关键原材料一样，黄金是一种有限资源，但目前世界上7%的黄金都存在于电子废弃物中。黄金提炼通常涉及出口到欧盟或亚洲的电子设备，在那里，电子废弃物在极高的温度下被熔炼，这是一种非常粗糙和碳密集的工艺。
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"We want to recover as much of the precious metals as we can from things which are currently waste," says Messenger. "Our focus is on doing this sustainably within the UK, using a process that's effective at room temperature while producing a lot less greenhouse gas emissions than smelting."

“我们希望从现有的废弃物中回收尽可能多的贵金属”，梅辛杰说。“我们的重点是在英国境内以可持续的方式做这件事情，采用一种在室温下可行的工艺，同时温室气体排放量比熔炼少得多”。

"If we're producing the waste, it should be our responsibility to sort it, we shouldn't be shipping it to another country to sort it for us," says Mark Loveridge, commercial director at the Royal Mint. He says that developing e-waste supply chains around localised recycling plants would dramatically cut the waste miles required to transport discarded electronics by sea, air and road, and the Royal Mint is already in talks with partners around the world with the ambition to globalise this technology.

英国皇家造币厂的商务总监马克·洛夫里奇表示：“既然我们产生了废弃物，那么我们就有责任对其进行处理，我们不应该将其运送到另一个国家来为我们处理”。他表示，围绕本地的回收处理厂来发展电子废弃物供应链将大大减少通过海运、空运、公路运输电子废弃物所需的里程，皇家造币厂已经在与世界各地的合作伙伴进行谈判，目标是使这项技术走向全球。

Swapping my lab coat for an orange hard hat, high-vis jacket and black, steel-toe-capped boots, I head to the new processing plant. Dozens of huge dumpy bags are stacked up in the far corner of this 3,000 sq m (32,292 sq ft) factory, each filled with colourful circuit boards. These have been removed from laptops and mobile phones, and delivered to the factory by a network of 50 e-waste suppliers around the country.

我把实验室白大褂换成橙色安全帽、高可见度的夹克、黑色钢头靴，前往参观新的处理厂。在这座占地3000 平方米（32,292 平方英尺）工厂的远处角落里，堆放着数十个巨大的垃圾袋，每个袋子里都装满了五颜六色的电路板。它们都是从笔记本电脑和手机上拆下来的，并由全国 50 家电子废弃物供应商组成的网络运送到这家处理厂。
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On arrival, circuit boards are inspected and tipped into a large silver hopper which funnels this raw material into a huge multi-coloured machine. Tony Baker, director of manufacturing innovation who is overseeing the installation of this plant, explains that as circuit boards get mechanically separated and broken up, any non-gold components are kept to one side, while any gold-bearing parts such as USB ports are digitally detected and sent to a 500-litre (110 gallon) reactor. Here, the "magic green solution" gets added on a much larger scale, gold sand is extracted and, again, nuggets are produced.

电路板抵达后，经过检查并倒入一个大型银色料斗中，料斗将这些原料送入一台五颜六色的大型装置中。据负责监督该厂装置的制造创新总监托尼·贝克介绍，随着电路板被机械分离和分解，不含黄金的零部件被放在一侧，含金的零部件（例如USB端口）被数字化检测到后，被送至一台容量500升（110加仑）的反应器中。在那里，“神奇的绿色溶液”被大量地添加，提炼出金砂，并再次形成金块。

Because so much non-gold is removed at the start, the chemical processing is only applied to fragments containing gold, as Baker explains. The raw material used by the Royal Mint is comprised of circuit boards, rather than entire laptops or whole mobile phones. Once the gold has been extracted, the leftover non-gold components are all sent off to different parts of the supply chain for reuse, so nothing gets wasted. The gold content varies between 60 parts per million to 900 parts per million, depending on the feedstock, according to Loveridge.

据贝克透露，由于一开始就去除了很多不含黄金的零部件，因此化学处理只应用于含金的碎片。皇家造币厂使用的原材料是电路板，而不是整台笔记本电脑或手机。一旦黄金被提炼出来，剩余的不含黄金的零部件会被送往供应链的各个环节进行再利用，因此没有任何浪费。洛夫里奇表示，根据原料的不同，零部件的含金量在百万分之60- 900之间，具体取决于原料。

The gold nuggets extracted from electronic waste are crafted into bracelets, necklaces and cufflixs

从电子废弃物中提炼的金块被制成手镯、项链、袖扣。

While currently, the Royal Mint's waste reprocessing plant just specialises in gold recycling at a relatively small scale, the ambition is to eventually branch out and recover other precious metals from the same circuit board raw material as this system expands. And when any remaining plastic or fibreglass is processed, some of the energy produced is converted into synthetic gas that is fed into the Mint's own local energy plant – so it will be used directly to generate electricity and power on-site. This is part of the company's plan to generate 70% of the power required to run the entire manufacturing site through renewables such as solar, wind, combined heat and power plus battery storage.

虽然目前，皇家造币厂的废弃物后处理厂只是专门从事规模相对较小的黄金回收，但其目标是随着该系统的扩展，最终扩展业务，从同样的电路板原材料中回收其他贵金属。当剩余的塑料或玻璃纤维被处理时，产生的部分能量被转化为合成气体，供应给造币厂在当地的能源工厂，从而直接用于发电和现场供电。这是该公司计划的一部分，该计划旨在通过太阳能、风能、热电联产、电池存储等可再生能源，产生整个制造基地运行所需电力的70%。

If the Excir chemistry can be adapted to recover a wider variety of precious metals, and if the entire system can run on locally produced renewables, there's scope to replicate this at other refineries around the country in a low-impact way and divert e-waste before it gets exported. The biggest challenge is to ensure that this network of e-waste suppliers and processors grows in a way that prioritises and incentivises reuse close to home, says Loveridge.

如果Excir公司的化学工艺经过改良可用于回收更多种类的贵金属，同时整个系统可以利用当地产生的可再生能源来运行，那么就有可能在全国其他精炼厂以较为环保的方式推广这一工艺，并在电子废弃物出口之前将其运走。洛夫里奇指出，最大的挑战在于如何确保电子废弃物供应商和处理商的网络以优先考虑和激励在本地附近进行再利用的方式发展。

"The more you can separate at the start, the less effort you have to put in, the purer it is and the better value we get for it," says Baker. "We require the precious metals – that's very important as a material source for us – but it's not just about taking the metal out and discarding the rest. We wanted to find a home for every single part of these circuit boards."

“你一开始分离得越多，需要投入的精力就越少，纯度就越高，我们从中获得的价值就越高”，贝克说道。“我们需要贵金属——这对我们来说是非常重要的材料来源——但并不是提取出贵金属就丢弃剩余部分那么简单，我们希望为电路板的每一个零部件都找到归宿”。

Once the gold has been removed, what remains gets ground into fine particles with the non-gold e-waste. It's then split into different fractions. Tubs of copper concentrate, steel and tin are sold and sent off to specialist recyclers for reuse, while the remaining char from processing any leftover fibreglass goes to a local cement works. The leach solution used in the chemical process is also sent off for recycling once it's been reused up to 20 times. Once fully operational, zero waste will be the goal, says Loveridge.

一旦黄金被提炼出来，剩余部分就会与不含黄金的电子废弃物一起磨成细颗粒。然后对它们进行分类，成桶的铜精矿、钢材、锡被出售，运往专业回收商那里进行再利用，而加工剩余玻璃纤维而留下的炭则被运往当地水泥厂。化学过程中使用的浸出液在重复使用 20 次后也会被送去回收。洛夫里奇表示，一旦全面投入使用，零废弃物将成为目标。
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Urban mining – recovering precious metals from existing waste products such as these circuit boards – is a burgeoning trend and there's certainly plenty of e-waste available.

城市采矿——从电路板等现有废弃物中回收贵金属是一种新兴趋势，而且肯定有大量的电子废弃物可供利用。

Kate Hinton, external relations lead at Material Focus, the non-profit behind the Recycle Your Electricals campaign, points out that UK households are hoarding 527 million small old electricals, including 31 million old laptops, weighing around 190,000 tonnes. In the US, mobile phones containing $60m (£47m) worth of gold and silver are thrown out annually. A 2022 report by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory calculated that more than one billion electronic devices could be discarded annually in the US a decade from now – and that these electronics could become a source of roughly half the amount of gold that is currently mined there.

“回收你的电器”运动背后的非营利组织Material Focus的对外关系负责人凯特·辛顿指出，英国家庭囤积了 5.27 亿件废旧小家电，其中包括 3100 万台旧笔记本电脑，重量约为 19 万吨。在美国，人们每年丢弃的手机含有价值 6000 万美元（4700 万英镑）的黄金和白银。劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室在2022年发布的一份报告，十年后，美国每年将会有超过10亿台电子设备被丢弃。这些电子设备可能成为美国目前开采黄金量大约一半的来源。

Experts argue metals are "eminently recyclable", especially because the environmental cost of mining ore to get just a tiny amount of gold is enormous. Already, the US-based jeweller Ring Bear is working with salvaged gold. Pandora has set a target of using only recycled gold and silver by 2025. For the Tokyo Olympics, metal was extracted from six million mobile phones and almost 72,000 tonnes of e-waste to make 5,000 gold, silver and bronze medals.

专家认为，金属的“可回收性非常高”，特别是因为开采矿石来获取微量黄金会产生巨大的环境成本。美国珠宝商Ring Bear已经开始使用回收的黄金。潘多拉 (Pandora) 制定了到 2025 年只使用回收的黄金和白银的目标。在东京奥运会上，从 600 万部手机和大约 7.2万吨电子废弃物中提炼出金属，制成 5000 枚金、银、铜牌。

155,000 tonnes of small electrical waste is thrown away every year, says Hinton, who wants to see e-waste recycling become the social norm. While she accepts that recycling won't solve every problem, she says it seems "crazy" to waste foundational materials needed to make future green tech.

辛顿表示，每年有15.5万吨小型电子垃圾被丢弃，她希望看到电子废弃物回收成为社会常态。虽然她承认回收并不能解决所有问题，但她表示，浪费打造未来绿色科技所需的基础材料似乎是“疯了”。

"We need the resources to make smart devices smart or to make renewable energies function. At the moment we're letting too many of them get lost because they're not being recycled," says Hinton. "The challenge with tech is that it's presented to us as amazing, clean, shiny, and we don't really think about what's inside that. Let's value the materials that allow that tech to work and keep [these critical raw materials] in the system for as long as possible."

“我们需要这些资源来使智能设备变得智能化，使可再生能源发挥作用​​。目前，我们失去了太多的资源，因为它们没有被回收”，辛顿说道。“科技面临的挑战在于，它所呈现给我们的产品令人惊叹、干净、闪亮，但我们没有充分考虑它们所含的材料。我们应该重视这些让科技得以发挥作用的材料，并尽可能长时间地将（这些关键原材料）留在系统中”。

All the medals at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games were made from recycled electronic waste

2020 年东京奥运会的所有奖牌均由回收的电子废弃物制成。

Innovation is needed to make e-waste recycling mainstream, says Hinton. "Particularly with small electricals, such as chargers, plugs and cables that are full of copper. Whilst what the Royal Mint are doing is great, the gold is a very small part of all this other material." This requires heavy investment in research and development to develop productive, commercial processes. With growing awareness about the environmental and social impacts of conventional mining, new green technologies could be scaled up enough to drive the growth of a more circular economy for precious metals.

辛顿表示，只有创新才能让电子废弃物回收成为主流。“特别是小家电，例如富含铜的充电器、插头、电缆。虽然皇家造币厂所做的事情很棒，但黄金是所有这些材料中很小的一部分”。这需要在研发方面进行大力投资，以发展富有成效的商业化生产工艺。随着人们越来越意识到传统采矿对环境和社会的影响，新的绿色技术可以得到充分推广，以推动贵金属循环经济的发展。

When it comes to accelerating this transition, pioneers are few and far between. US firm New Gold Recovery is developing a toxic-free method that extracts gold particles from the mine tailings that would otherwise be disposed of. UK company N2S uses a bio-leaching technique to recover materials from shredded IT equipment – in 2021, they recovered 129 tonnes of copper alone. In New Zealand and Australia, green chemistry company Mint is scaling up its network of city-based biorefineries to extract various metals, such as gold and copper, from e-waste in a similarly low-carbon way. Mint's Sydney-based operation will service about 25% of Australia's total printed-circuit-board waste (approximately 3,000 tonnes), with plans to expand into the UK by 2024.

说到加速转型，先驱者寥寥无几。美国“新黄金回收”公司正在研发一种无毒方法，从原本废弃的尾矿中提炼黄金颗粒。英国公司 N2S 采用生物浸出技术从粉碎的IT设备中回收材料——2021 年，仅仅回收的铜就多达129吨。在新西兰和澳大利亚，绿色化学公司 Mint正在扩大其以城市为基础的生物炼厂网络，以同样低碳的方式从电子废弃物中提炼金、铜等各类金属。这家总部位于悉尼的公司将处理澳大利亚约25%的印刷电路板废弃物（约3000吨），并计划到 2024 年将业务扩展到英国。

Material Focus estimates £13m-worth ($16.6) of critical raw materials could be recovered from waste electricals in the UK annually if more advanced recovery technologies are developed and used in the future. Material Focus also identified circuit boards, like the ones being processed here in South Wales, as a key component that needed to be better handled to reduce wastage and recover some of the most valuable materials such as gold, silver and palladium.

据Material Focus估算，如果未来研发并采用更先进的回收技术，英国每年可以从废弃家电中回收价值1300万英镑（1660万美元）的关键原材料。Material Focus 认为电路板（正如在南威尔士加工的那种）是一种关键部件，需要得到更好的处理来减少浪费，并回收最有价值的材料，例如金、银、钯等。

The Royal Mint's secret chemical formula does have the potential to recover other precious metals besides gold, such as palladium, silver and copper from e-waste and in the future, these could be used to make lots of other products aside from jewellery. Loveridge is particularly excited by the prospect of recovering critical materials that can then feed straight into production of electric vehicles and renewable energy.

皇家造币厂的秘密化学配方确实有潜力从电子废弃物中回收除黄金外的其他贵金属，例如钯、银、铜，这些材料可用于制造除珠宝外的许多其他产品。洛夫里奇对回收关键材料的前景感到特别兴奋，它们可以直接用于制造电动汽车和可再生能源。
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"We'll need a lot of copper and circuit boards are about 20% copper," Loveridge says. "So, while for us gold is really important and it's about us reducing our reliance on mined gold – actually the copper plays a really important role to other organisations within the UK. And we will be able to start generating a source here ourselves."

洛夫里奇说：“我们需要大量的铜，而电路板的铜含量约为 20%”。 “因此，虽然黄金对我们来说非常重要，而且关系到我们减少对开采黄金的依赖，但实际上铜对英国境内的其他组织起着非常重要的作用，我们将有能力开始在本国打造一个铜源”。

As my tour around the new factory site comes to an end, Baker says: "We're trying to encourage the idea that one person's waste is someone else's raw material."

当我对新工厂的参观即将结束时，贝克说：“我们试图鼓励这样一种观念，即一个人的废弃物是另一个人的原材料”。