Environmentally Friendly Bronze Plating Process for Circulation Coins

This process was developed in Canada at the Royal Canadian Mint facility in Winnipeg, Manitoba. This product is now commercially available for circulation coinage requirements of other countries.

The Royal Canadian Mint completed the successful manufactuing scale-up of bronze plated circulation products through a recently developed electroplating process that is a more environmentally friendly process that does not use toxic chemicals such as cyanide chemistry. The bronze plated products can be candidate materials for mono color coins as well as bi-color higher denominations.

Traditionally a bronze plating process used harsh chemistry and the related waste water treatment requires strong oxidizing agents to break down harsh chemicals before being released to municipal environmental standards. However, this is no longer the case using the newly formulated chemistry whereby both the plating process and subsequent waste water treatment are environmentally friendlier.

The Royal Canadian Mint has patented this environmentally friendly bronze technology.

Royal Canadian Mint Research and Development (R&D) and Winnipeg Operations teams.

As described above, the main features of the RCM bronze plated products and process eliminate the need to use a harsh process chemistry. This technology breakthrough has improved the effectiveness to achieve a bronze surface finish of the products, and furthermore, this technology can be manufacuted in safe work environment for our operations’ staff as well as the local community where the electroplating facility is located.

It is noted that all electroplating processes require waste water treatment. The traditional bronze plating process involves strong oxidizers to chemically breakdown the harsh chemistry in order to meet municipal water emission standards and limits. The RCM bronze plated process does not require these strong oxidizers, which makes the electroplating process safer, more efficient and cost effective in terms of waste water treatment and chemical management.

This technology was developed by the internal talents of the RCM R&D team to develop the proprietary formulation and process chemistry. During the development of the chemical formulations, the knowledge gained allowed for the team to file this technology for intellectual property protection (ie. patented). The unique features include differentiated grain structures of the plating and its surface properties, coin striking performance, an environmentally friendly plating process and waste water treatment.

The Royal Canadian Mint has long been a leader in high quality, durable plating solutions. This new process does not use harsh chemicals to produce bronze coloured circulation coinage products, thereby eliminating a chemistry that can pose a risk to the environment and to the health and safety of employees if not processed with extreme caution.