The Royal Mint is turning e-waste into gold jewelery: this new campaign tells the story

Like other elements and precious metals, gold is formed from the death of stars (supernovas). This means it’s a finite resource and, therefore, precious, which makes the waste even more alarming.

As well as busying itself with minting general circulation and special edition coins for the UK and around 60 other countries, The Royal Mint is now using reclaimed gold to create a jewelry collection. Designed by a commissioned jewelry designer, the 886 collection, so called as this is when the Royal Mint started producing coins, will soon be available for commercial sale.

If this is all sounding a bit like alchemy, that’s because it’s not far off. The process involves circuit boards being organized so that the right recovery method can be adopted before a patented technology is used to extract the gold from e-waste like phones and laptops. This all takes place at The Royal Mint’s gold recovery plant in the Brecon Beacons, Wales.

This stream of work is one of the ways that The Royal Mint is engaging in sustainable product development, by using waste as a raw material. It’s also reclaiming silver from X-rays, for example, but that’s a very separate endeavor.

Few people know what The Royal Mint does beyond its core function, and with this in mind it briefed EveryFriday to create a campaign for the jewelry range.

After a tender process, EveryFriday became a rostered agency in April 2024 and was invited to pitch against others on a marketing services roster.

Sustainable precious metals

“We pitched forward an idea in response to a brief around helping The Royal Mint create a heightened sense of excitement for its new vision, sustainable precious metals,” says executive creative director and founder Dan Fernandez.

Really, the Royal Mint wanted to appeal to a new generation of fairly affluent, aspirational customers according to Fernandez. “For us, the most exciting proof point was what the precious metal recovery plant was doing and to use that narrative to tell the story of precious metal and specifically gold,” he says.

This story was a boon for Fernandez who says, “You begin to start thinking about the absurdity of this stuff being thrown away in tech and that this stuff was gifted from the universe.” Around 50 million tonnes of this gold is trapped in e-waste according to The Royal Mint.

"Something bigger than us”

Out of this has come the Forever Metal campaign, centered on a film shot in the Brecon Beacons and voiced by Welsh actor James Wilbraham. It tells the story of showing the eternal value of a finite resource.

The main part of the story is “both the idea of reclamation and the sense that this [gold] is something bigger than us”, says Fernandez. This narrative needed to be told against a Welsh backdrop “in a way that felt honest, which was a challenge at times because working with CGI is not a real situation,” he adds.

Directors Luke and Joseph “are brilliant at capturing the natural landscape, and we’ve shot with them before, so we knew they’d be able to make the environment feel special,” Fernandez says.

Meanwhile, director of photography David Proctor was capturing shots for the wider campaign, which will roll out across film, print, social media and digital.

The campaign is a change of direction for The Royal Mint. "It was about appealing to a younger, more style-aware audience," adds EveryFriday client partner Daniel Wade. "[We wanted to] dispel assumptions that The Royal Mint are coin makers only, instead placing them on the radar of planet-conscious consumers."