Industrial gold processing: how buying jewelry helps factories get raw materials
Have you ever wondered where broken earrings, stretched chains, and out-of-fashion gold-rimmed rings go? That's right — they gather dust in the closet, moving from shelf to shelf. Meanwhile, someone is making money from it. And not a pawnshop with its "375 samples, father, this is copper," but real industrial plants that pay real money. Buying jewelry is the first link in the chain that turns your "junk" into ingots for electronics, medicine, and mints. And if you don't know, you're losing money every day while this stuff is dead weight.
Industrial Gold Recycling: Why Factories Hunt for Your Old Earrings
Let's say you're the owner of a refining plant. Your task is to get a ton of gold. The first option is to send geologists, open a quarry, grind hundreds of thousands of tons of ore, drain tons of cyanide into a tailings dump, and pay for electricity as for a small town. In two years you will have this gold. The second option is to buy scrap jewelry from the population, melt it down and clean it in two weeks. Can you guess what the factory workers will choose?
Factories aren't hunting for your earrings because they feel sorry for the planet. It's just that secondary gold is already in solid form, with a known breakdown. It does not need to be extracted from ore — it only needs to be processed. The cost of a gram of scrap is about a third lower than that of ore. And the time to enter the market is not years, but days. Therefore, they give a price for scrap that is close to the exchange price, and not the measly thousand per gram that is offered in the "buy-at-home".
Here's a live example. The client had a broken bracelet weighing 12 grams. He thought it was a 585 sample, but to clear his conscience, he brought it to our spectrometer. It turned out to be 750 proof, because it was an Italian import. The difference in price between the pawnshop rate of 585 and the real rate of 750 was 18 thousand rubles. Factories are willing to pay for a high sample — they also have less cleaning work. And pawnshops average down.
A typical mistake people make is to assume that their gold is "old" and therefore worthless. The sample does not age. Gold is a hundred years old or ten — there is no difference. The factory looks at the pure metal content, not the year of manufacture.
Industrial gold processing is not about melting in a basement. This is an industry with a turnover of hundreds of billions of dollars, and your scrap in it is a scarce raw material.
How is the processing of jewelry scrap from purchase to ingot
The technology involves several stages, and at each stage you can either earn or lose in value. The first entry point is the purchase. The correct purchase is not "by eye" with acid, but with an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer. You put the ring down, and the device gives you an accurate sample. Without the options of "oh, and here's the solder." Solder it too