How Do I Get Value from Old Industrial Catalysts Containing Precious Metals?
Most people don't think twice about spent industrial catalysts. Once they're pulled from service, they look like waste: discolored pellets or powder that couldn't catalyze a reaction anymore if you paid them.
But the precious metals haven't gone anywhere. They're still there.
Specialty Metals Smelters & Refiners handles this material regularly, and here's the thing: just because a catalyst can't do its job anymore doesn't mean it's worthless. The platinum, palladium, rhodium, or whatever else was loaded into that catalyst is still locked in the substrate. Recovering it is the whole point.
What metals are we talking about?
The catalysts that come through typically contain platinum, palladium, or rhodium. Sometimes all three. These show up in reforming catalysts, petrochemical processes, oxidation applications. Then there's nickel from hydrogenation work, cobalt and molybdenum from hydroprocessing, vanadium in some cases.
Concentrations vary wildly. It depends on the catalyst type, what process it was used in, how long it ran. But even low percentages add up when you're dealing with drums or supersacks of the stuff. A container of spent catalyst might be worth recovering or it might not. You genuinely can't tell by looking at it.
You can't eyeball this stuff
Here's the problem: guessing doesn't work. Specialty Metals sees customers all the time who assume their spent catalyst is worthless. Or the opposite, they think they're sitting on a fortune and they're not. Visual inspection tells you nothing.
The only way to know is laboratory assaying. Representative samples get taken (and sampling technique matters more than people realize), then fire assay or ICP analysis determines what's actually there. That data is what drives the rest of the process. Without it you're just guessing.
Some catalysts look identical but came from completely different processes and have totally different metal content. There's just no shortcut here.
What actually happens during recovery
When spent catalysts arrive at Specialty Metals, they go through refining processes designed specifically for catalyst materials. This isn't melting down jewelry or processing circuit boards. Catalyst carriers can be alumina, silica, carbon, other substrates, and each one requires different handling to get the metals out efficiently.
Then the metals need to be separated from each other, which gets complicated fast when you've got platinum and palladium in the same sample. After that comes purification to get everything to the grade that has actual market value.
One thing that makes the whole process easier is keeping different catalyst types separated. Don't mix platinum reforming catalysts with nickel hydrogenation catalysts. Different processes, different metal contents, different refining approaches. When customers mix everything together it just creates problems.
So how do I get value from old industrial catalysts containing precious metals?
The practical answer is you need to work with someone who actually handles this specific material. General scrap recyclers usually don't have the setup for it.
Specialty Metals focuses on catalyst recovery. The process starts with sending in samples for assay, then once everyone knows what's in the material there's a conversation about settlement terms. What you get back depends on metal content, what's actually recoverable, and current market conditions. Precious metal prices change daily, so nobody can quote you fixed values.
A few things affect what you'll actually recover:
Sampling has to be done right. One bad sample throws off everything. Documentation helps too. If you know what process the catalyst came from, even rough information is useful. And volume matters. A single drum gets handled differently than regular ongoing material.
Where the metals end up
After refining, the recovered platinum, palladium, rhodium, whatever else was in there, goes back into industrial supply chains. A lot of it ends up in new catalyst production, which closes the loop. Specialty Metals provides settlement reports showing what was recovered from each batch, because without documentation you're just taking someone's word for it.
The industrial metals market moves on supply and demand like anything else. Recovered precious metals from spent catalysts are a meaningful chunk of supply, especially for metals like rhodium where primary mining can't keep up with demand.
Getting started
If you've got spent catalysts sitting in storage and you're wondering whether recovery makes sense, first step is getting them assayed. Specialty Metals can arrange sampling and analysis, then actually talk through what the numbers mean and whether processing pencils out economically.
Not every batch is worth recovering. Sometimes metal content is too low, or the material type creates complications that outweigh the value. Better to know that upfront than waste time and money.
For operations generating spent catalysts regularly, Specialty Metals works out ongoing arrangements rather than letting material accumulate. Either approach works, depends on your situation.
The point is spent catalysts containing precious metals aren't automatically waste. They're a potential resource if the metal content justifies recovery. You just need proper assaying and refiners who understand the material. That's what Specialty Metals does.
