Thanks for the insight! It makes sense in a big-picture way. The precious metals market has always seemed more irrational than the rest.
I’m thinking of refining, not just melt. take some amount of jewelry with any gold content, isolate the gold bits which are maybe 90%-99.5% gold, then through a chemical process, which can take a fair bit of time and does involve dangerous chemicals and noxious fumes (don’t skip the fume hood), refine that material, removing the impurities (other metals), until you’re left with (hopefully) 99.9999% gold that can be sold at spot prices or higher.
A similar thing can be done with silver, through electrolysis.
You can do that with E waste, I have seen tick tockers that already have a marble sized nugget of gold from doing it.
But again, the alloy in it’s jewelry form is almost always worth more than its metal value. Even old super ugly styles eventually come back into popularity, there is a reason you don’t see pawn shops melting down their inventory.
Based on the YouTube videos I have watched about this process it is pretty labor intensive as well. Sounds like a super fun project for a chemistry enthusiast but I wouldn’t expect the hourly wage of the work to be particularly high… Although…
Thanks for the insight! It makes sense in a big-picture way. The precious metals market has always seemed more irrational than the rest.
I’m thinking of refining, not just melt. take some amount of jewelry with any gold content, isolate the gold bits which are maybe 90%-99.5% gold, then through a chemical process, which can take a fair bit of time and does involve dangerous chemicals and noxious fumes (don’t skip the fume hood), refine that material, removing the impurities (other metals), until you’re left with (hopefully) 99.9999% gold that can be sold at spot prices or higher.
A similar thing can be done with silver, through electrolysis.
You can do that with E waste, I have seen tick tockers that already have a marble sized nugget of gold from doing it.
But again, the alloy in it’s jewelry form is almost always worth more than its metal value. Even old super ugly styles eventually come back into popularity, there is a reason you don’t see pawn shops melting down their inventory.
Based on the YouTube videos I have watched about this process it is pretty labor intensive as well. Sounds like a super fun project for a chemistry enthusiast but I wouldn’t expect the hourly wage of the work to be particularly high… Although…
https://goldrefiningforum.com/threads/does-anyone-make-a-profit-refining-gold.3063/
This^ thread is of more value than my opinion lol