Gold Recycling Can Make You Money!
The single objective of gold recycling is to recoup as much 24-karat gold as is possible from various products that contain discernible traces of this noble metal. Manufacturing plants maintain rules that prevent the illegal diversion of gold from the recycling program. Since the process of gold recycling and reclaim is very expensive, it is important to make an estimate beforehand of how much the recovered gold will be worth.
There are many sources of scrap gold that can reward gold recycling efforts with a yield of pure gold. Some sources of recycled gold are:
• waste from goldsmiths and jewelers, such as waste water, rags, and floor sweepings
• waste from facilities that process gold, such as unidentified ingots, cuttings, shavings, and clippings
• electronics and computer factories
• dental laboratories that make implants and fillings from dental gold.
Until fairly recently, some of these were considered not economical for gold recycling. Now, however, recovering gold even from these sources has become a viable project because of new techniques for gold recycling. For example, there are minute quantities of pure gold in many electronic components, microchips, printed circuit boards, and card edge connectors. This gold is generally in the form of gold plating only 1/10 of a micron in thickness. Although gold recycling from electronics is very expensive, the quantity of discarded and dumped computers, television sets, cell phones, PDAs, and other electronic gadgets is growing almost exponentially. For this reason, building recycling facilities that can recover precious metals economically seems like an excellent plan.
Once a source is identified, the next step in recycling precious metals is to identify the kind of metal and the level of purity. This requires a number of steps:
• preparation of a “batch” – liquefying by thermal fusion, then stirring till the homogenous stage is reached
• taking and analysis of samples by means of cupellation – “exposure to high temperature in a blast of air by which the unwanted metals are oxidized” (Merriam-Webster Online)
• absorption spectrometry
• emission spectrometry
• electrolysis (particularly effective for electronic components and gold-plated jewelry)
A less elaborate procedure suffices for dealing with cuttings, offcuts, shavings, and slivers: just melt them together at a high temperature, and assay the resulting cast ingot.
Not many metal recyclers can handle gold recycling, because of the technological advancement of these processes, and the expertise they require. It is even more complex to recover gold that is lost during certain operations of chemical manufacturing, or from electronic components or circuitry. Just the setup of a laboratory for analysis would require the investment of many thousands of dollars. It is therefore of the utmost importance that a business planning on gold recycling in this manner secure an adequate number of dependable suppliers of gold scrap.
Even though gold recycling processes are tedious and complicated, the gold recycling industry is flourishing worldwide. Each year there seem to be new companies joining the industry. The commercial uses of gold are increasing, and so is the number of businesses working to save this precious commodity. Currently, the industry leader in gold recycling is France, whose complex techniques of analysis and recovery are exported everywhere. In addition, South Africa and Italy, both of which have long traditions of recovering gold from scraps, are making themselves known in the industry. With efforts such as these increasing constantly, about 25% of the world’s gold supply now consists of recycled gold.
Indeed the gold recycling industry is very promising in spite of the complicated processes it implies. It doesn’t matter how many companies get involved in this business every year; there is always room for more. Gold will never lose its value so dealing with gold is likely to bring you nice profits in the long run, if you act wisely and cautiously.
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