Over the last few months, gold has been occupying center stage for people who invest in precious metals. And with good reason! As we have noted on this blog over the last few weeks, the trading price of gold has broken all previous records.

But before you turn your back on other precious metals, we would like to point out something that is obvious, but easy to overlook . . .

Only a decade ago, film photography seemed to be dying as more and more photographers turned in their old film cameras and went digital. Then about five years ago, people started to set aside their digital cameras as they took more and more of their snapshots on phones.

Even though film and other analog photo supplies are selling at a tiny fraction of what they were in the pre-digital age, those increases are significant. Since film photography is highly reliant on silver, does that increase mean that silver will be in greater demand, and trading prices will rise? It could be. Whenever demand increases for a commodity that is in a fixed supply, prices for that commodity rise. 

If your liquid chemicals contain gold, silver, platinum or other precious metals, how can they be separated (precipitated) out of their solutions and tuned into solid metallic form again? Several different processes can be used to precipitate previous metals from liquids... 

Over the last century, all kinds of media – for audio recording, video recording and the recording of still images – have consistently been replaced by new media that have been better in one way or another. And every time something new hit the marketplace, large quantities of the old “stuff” got tossed away, got sold at discount prices, or was snapped up by collectors. So, where can you find silver in obsolete media?

Recycling precious metals often involves analyzing and refining big messy batches of mixed materials. People who own these mixed lots of material know that gold or silver or platinum is “in there” somewhere, but don’t know where it is, what it is, or how much of it is present.