How do jewellers capture every last particle of gold dust? (2017)

Reminds me of my favorite story from the Manhattan project: The project needed massive amounts of wire for all the equipment, but copper was in short supply for the war effort. They ended up working out a deal with the Treasury Department to use silver instead, since it was an even better conductor & apparently more available at the time. Part of the deal involved making sure not to lose any silver & IIRC they managed to not only return all the borrowed silver, they even found some extra to return by tearing up the floors in all the mints, warehouses & workshops, to incinerate & reclaim the precious metal, just like in the article!

I did my jewellery trade in Australia (hence the correct spelling for me). We used to keep all our emery paper, old polishing wheels etc and send them off ever few years to be burnt & refined.

When the building we were in got renovated some enterprising guys in another workshop ripped up their floor boards and their neighbouring empty suites and got all the precious metals out of the gaps between the floorboards.

The building was 11 stories and was predominantly filled with small jewellery workshops with 2-5 people per business. And a lot of adjacent businesses (trade supplies, stone merchants etc).

Reminds me of the people that scavenge gold and gems off New York sidewalks

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/06/22/new-york...

https://www.igi.org/digging-for-gold-in-new-yorks-sidewalks/

Saw it in Karachi last year: a street containing exclusively gold workshops was blocked for traffic Sunday morning, guarded officially by the police, while the staff hired by the co-op swept every inch. Apparently this is a weekly routine.

I wonder how much precious metal such as gold and semiprecious metal such as gallium and indium essentially disappears forever in the thousands of tons of electronic waste every year. Does anyone know the percentages recovered/lost?

Right, some recovery does occur—gold from edge/contact connectors etc. but I'd venture it's only a small fraction of what is used annually. And what about LEDs and transistors? I wonder if anyone ever bothers to recover the gallium and indium from them or whether the amount used isn't worth the effort.

Here's a series of videos showing the recovery and refining process:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePEwr-VxqXE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKGhmt7jgMg

My father (makes fake teeth) rips up his carpet every decade and has it burned and the metal dust in it melted down. Usually gets $10k-$15k.

Interesting term of the trade in the article: "lemel". (Metal filings)

Wiktionary: From Middle English lymail, from Anglo-Norman limaille, from Latin limare, a form of limo (“to file”); see further there.

Fascinating. Now I wonder why jewelers don't always just work in sealed containers with vacuums like what is used for sand blasting.

I wonder now how much gold dust gets accumulated in the lungs of goldsmiths. I wonder if they take organs to check for sweeps.

> Hockley Mint has also upgraded its windows so that blinds are now encased between panes of glass — their fabric panels were a magnet for precious metal dust — and it also has an on-site laundry to process workers’ clothes.

Hilarious — I guess big tech companies weren't the first to offer employees on-site laundry after all!

Reminds me a little of the man who "mines" gold and precious gems from the sidewalks in NYC: https://nypost.com/2011/06/20/got-his-mined-in-the-gutter/

  >  Mr Wibberley recalls when a parquet floor in its own factory was ripped up and the precious metals embedded in the wood made it worth £20 per sq m.

I find this interesting, as nicely re-claimed wood flooring itself can actually fetch about that price per sq meter these days.

Piece of advice I’ve given people having jewellery resized for years, is if you are having something resized down then the jeweller should be paying you. A surprising number of people forget the majority of most jewellery value is the raw material.

Reminds me of Cody's Lab refining platinum from roadside dust from the highway: (due to catalytic converters)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5GPWJPLcHg

I found it interesting that CNC machines aimed at precious metal processing have an optional access control system for swarf/dust collection bins- presumably so that the technicians operating the machine don't steal the "waste" material.

My colleague told me a story just last week about his father's old job at Kodak working in silver reclamation. Same story as this article, they chuck everything into the furnace. They go so far as to filter the wastewater from employee showers.

So prepare yourself for the bloody mayhem and unholy carnage of Joshua Logan's "Paint Your Wagon"!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VM5-xFenaZI

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint_Your_Wagon_(film)

https://archive.org/details/paint-your-wagon-western-comedy-...

(Money shot at 1:44:30!)

Baird & Co. do the same: "“At the end of the year all of the filters are collected together and burned,” Baird says. “Everything is ‘deep cleaned’ and burned, all of the filters and all of the doormats both inside the refinery and throughout the office.” Last year the company retrieved £15,000 worth of gold from the deep clean."

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/dec/26/the-pots-of...

This is why if you ever get jewellery repaired or resized, ask for the scrap to be returned.

Some less than reputable places will try to off-handedly say it was discarded. They don't lose anything.

Ingenious! Why not. Beats getting it out of the ground. Possibly good for the environment as for a given gold demand less needs to be mined.

There was a story about the diamond district in New York City:

A homeless man would go and brush the sidewalks at night. The story is that there was so much gold and diamond dust on the clothes of the people working in that area that it would fall off of their clothes and accumulate on the sidewalks.

Wow, it sounds like the fine particles are going everywhere in the shops.

This made me wonder what the health benefits of having lungs of gold might be.

Remains to be seen, perhaps?

Wonder if that is the last industrial processing still done in central London? If you don't count university labs.

Use a magnet!

Edit: oops, never mind

How do the taxes work for this?