If your parents, grandparents or other family elders are downsizing or moving into adult living communities, this could be a good time to talk to them about the silverware, jewelry and other precious metal items they own. Why talk to them today? Consider these reasons...

Here’s a video that shows how a new robot that Apple designed can pull apart an iPhone and separate out its parts. For reasons we do not know, Apple named this robot Liam. According to Apple, just one Liam robot can recycle 1.2 million iPhones a year.

“Precious metals and rare earth element are the same thing, right?”
 Let’s clear up this misconception right away. No, precious metals and rare earths are not the same. In today’s post, we’ll find out what the difference is

You could try to perform those operations yourself by burning old electronic components or other metal-bearing materials at home or – preferably – in an outdoor setting where poisonous fumes are released into the air. But we cannot state strongly enough that by doing so, you can poison yourself and release noxious gases into the atmosphere. 

Shakespeare once wrote, “All that glitters is not gold.” If he had thought about it, he could have written something similar about silver, platinum, rhodium, and other precious metals. The fact is that some shiny things that look like they should be worth a lot of money really aren’t. They either don’t contain any precious metals at all or they contain such small quantities that there is no point sending them to a qualified precious metals refinery like Specialty Metals Smelters and Refiners, because the cost of extracting those metals will be greater than the value of the metals themselves.

We’re going to crawl out on a limb today and state our opinion that karat gold jewelry scrap is probably the biggest and best source of recyclable gold. Why do we think that? Because you don’t have to go panning in the Yukon to find jewelry scrap or (in most cases) hike around fields with a metal detector. Karat jewelry gold scrap is a lot easier to find than that, as the following stories illustrate. 

Do you have a quantity of jewelry pieces – findings, bits of chain, clasps or pins, perhaps – that you suspect might be valuable karat gold jewelry scrap? Or how about an old coin or piece of bullion that might, or might not, be pure karat gold?

Have you stopped to think how rare discoveries like those are, and how much more likely it is that you will discover quantities of precious metals in powders, shavings, sludge and other stuff that doesn’t look valuable? In other words, the crud that you will find lying around in old businesses and factories? If you don’t know where money can be found in crud, we will tell you in today’s post.

What’s the risk of poisoning yourself if you’re storing items made from precious metals that you’d like to recycle? What could happen to you if melt them down and attempt to process them? Actually, chances are pretty good that you’re going to do yourself a lot of harm. Why? Here’s some information you should know.

Silver bullets have figured in legends, TV shows and movies for years. The Lone Ranger, a hero from the early days of TV, fired silver bullets as symbols of justice and honor. Golden guns have been the stuff of legend too. One example? In the film “The Man with the Golden Gun,” an evil assassin named Scaramanga, who packs a golden gun, is trying to shoot James Bond. Are there really silver bullets and gold guns that you should be on the lookout for? Can you find some in antique stores or for sale online, buy them at low prices, and recycle them profitably with us? Let’s take a closer look.

How much gold, silver, platinum and other precious metals were in those buildings before they burned? Are those valuable metals ever recovered, or are they still waiting to be found in the ashes and rubble? 

...Most of the garments date from the Chinese Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), which was established by none other than the Mongolian conqueror Kublai Khan. That’s a long time ago, but isn’t it still possible to find antique items of clothing that are woven with gold – or maybe with silver or other precious metals? Here’s some information you should know when you go looking for precious metals in antique clothing. 

For several years now, the most common comment we’ve been hearing about investing in gold has been, “Gold prices are so low… stay away from it as an investment.” That’s the common wisdom. It might be common. But it is wise? Not really.

Findings are small, pre-manufactured metal items that are used in jewelry production. Chances are pretty good that as you read this post, some of them are right there in the room with you. If you bought a nice silver chain to give your niece for a present, for example, open the box and take a look at it. You’ll see that there is a small ring attached to one end, and some kind of clasp to the other. Those add-on pieces are findings. 

We’ve published posts in the past about why recycling gold is socially responsible. Recycled gold doesn’t have to be mined, and mining pollutes air and water and burns fossil fuels. And then there’s the fact that recycled gold is not dug from the earth by underpaid, exploited workers. Of course, it is possible that the gold that we recycle from computer motherboards, old jewelry and other sources does have a “dirty” past – because gold doesn’t have DNA, it is impossible to know whether it originally came from a mine in Africa or from ancient amulets that were stolen from the Aztecs. But even if that is the case, the gold that we recycle today is generations removed from any dirty sources and less closely linked to environmental or societal ills. 

We’ve written about sputtering targets in the past, but a few recent calls made us think that this would be a good time to remind our readers that most used sputtering targets still contain precious metals that are worth extracting.

We’ve already written about pink gold, rose gold, white gold, and even green gold on the Specialty Metals blog. (See related posts below.) We thought we’d seen just about every color, then we found an article entitled “What Can Make a Piece of Gold Turn Blue?” that Esther Inglis-Arkell wrote for io9.com. 

Today, lots of older flat screen TVs are appearing in dumpsters at the dump too. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, since flat screens have been the televisions of choice for more than a decade now. They’re already breaking down and wearing out. Plus, consumers are tossing old flat screens that still work pretty well so they can upgrade to smart TVs, bigger TVs, higher-definition TVs, and lots of other new products.

Did you know that some thermocouples contain gold and gold alloys? They are highly specialized, not the kind of thermocouples or thermocouple wire that you can pull out of old stoves or air conditioners. They are usually used in laboratory settings to measure low to moderate temperatures. If you acquire even a small quantity of them...

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.