Why Rhodium Recovery Is the Most Demanding Form of Recycling Today
A pretty good precious metal refinery might be good enough – or almost good enough – if they are recycling a batch of silver-plated tableware, candlesticks, or other fairly commonplace kinds of silver scrap for you. After all, if the refinery you are using let’s a troy ounce of silver go down the drain, which will cost you about $16.00 at today’s trading prices. Okay, that is bad, and the precious metals refinery you are using should never let any metal of yours slip away. But if you are having that refinery process, say, a few hundred pounds of silver scrap, maybe you can live with the loss of an ounce of silver.
Then we come to rhodium, which is trading at over $11,000 per troy ounce (at the time of this posting) on the London Fix. That is not a typo, rhodium really is trading at over $11,000 . Then we have to consider the fact that the trading price of rhodium has roughly doubled since the start of December 2019. Doubled. Many of us have never seen anything similar to that happen, or any precious metal hit such high prices.
Why is rhodium on such a roll? There are two basic reasons . . .
Rhodium is extremely rare
Rhodium is in demand for use in catalytic converters
How can it be that a metal that is trading for over $11,000 is being used in catalytic converters, which are stuck on the bottom of cars and exposed to road salt, theft and other kinds of loss? If the catalytic converter on your car contains rhodium (as well as platinum and palladium), why isn’t it worth $20,000, $25,000 or as much as your whole car? It’s because extremely minute quantities of rhodium are used in cat converters – just enough to help trigger the catalytic reaction that removes impurities from the exhaust gas. We are talking maybe a penny’s worth of rhodium or less in some cases. As we said, minuscule amounts.
Tiny Quantities Yield a Big Payback
Even though each of the catalytic converters you want to recycle contains only a minuscule amount of rhodium, you don’t want to throw it away. (You don’t want to throw away the platinum or palladium, or even the copper that catalytic converters contain either, do you?)
That explains why it is critical to entrust your recycling needs to Specialty Metals Smelters and Refiners. Whatever we are recycling for you – be it a cat converter, a batch of gold-plated jewelry, or a pile of thermocouple wire – we pledge to recover every ounce of the precious metals it contains. After all, those precious metals belong to you, not to us, even though you have entrusted us to extract them from the scrap you have sent us.
To learn more about where rhodium is and how to extract it from scrap, call our precious metals recycling experts today at 800-426-2344.