Recycled gold

Hi

Has anyone worked with recycled gold? Does anyone know of any
environmentally responsible refiners/smelters that deal with
recycled gold? Anyone ever had any problems, success, etc.? Love
to hear from you!

Susan

susan,

I’d guess that any of us who’ve worked with gold at all, have worked
with recycled gold. While gold mines world wide do churn out new
pristine gold every year, it’s not like the used stuff gets thrown
away. That is the main business of most refiners. they take the old
stuff, and clean it up and realloy it to pure or new alloys for us.
And the gold doesn’t generally get destroyed along the way, so any
mass of jewelry gold you’ve got probably contains metal that’s been
refined many times, and comes from many sources. Some of the gold
in a batch you might buy might be new, straight from the mine
smelter, but other portions of it, indistinguishable from the rest,
might be gold that people originally dug up and worked thousands of
years ago, which has been in circulation ever since. I think it’s
fair to say that a large part of the metal we use is, in fact,
recycled, and has been recycled many times in the past, and will be
again in the future too, perhaps. Were you perhaps looking for a
source of gold where you could be sure ALL of it came from such
recycled metal rather than the chance of some being from newly mined
metal? If so, I’m sure many of the refiners could easily tell you if
they can do that for you. The metal so supplied should be
indistinguishable from that from any other source or mine.

Peter

Susan, Some of the gold that we buy from our various suppliers is
recycled. I don’t know what the percentage is but consider that a
source of gold, and other metals, for refiners is scrap that has been
sold to them by jewelers and manufacturers. Another source are pawn
shops and metal dealers who buy old jewelry and send it to refiners
for cash. Joel

Joel Schwalb
@Joel_Schwalb
www.schwalbstudio.com