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

https://www.ft.com/content/0512638c-b7c2-11e6-961e-a1acd97f622d

by EndXA • 2 years ago

178 153 2 years ago

JackMorgan• 2 years ago

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.

utensil4778• 2 years ago

Because the work is remarkably intricate. It requires you to get real close and personal with the work, usually with magnification. It requires complete and unimpeded dexterity of your fingers, so bulky gloves are absolutely not an option.

Depending on the work, it may also require frequent trips to the hearth for torch work. You really don't want to use an oxy/propane torch in a sealed glovebox.

In short, it's too much hassle and makes the work more difficult and much slower.

pjd73• 2 years ago

They work with sulphuric acid, oxy/acetylene/propane torches. Some processes give off cyanide fumes. Ultrasonic baths with ammonia based solutions to clean polishing compounds off etc.

You need outside air ventilation.

There is lots of mechanical suction for things like polishing to capture the waste material for post processing.

Most will wear a leather apron for heat / burn protection and capturing fine dust/dirt from polishing compounds. I suppose you could destroy that eventually in a giant smelter.

nelsondev• 2 years ago

Sounds like you are ready to open a crematorium that specializes in former jewelers.

foxylad• 2 years ago

Or anyone with gold teeth.

nanomonkey• 2 years ago

More modern jewelry manufacturers are moving towards this. There are laser welders with glove boxes and microscopes that are auto shielding, also cnc milling machines in completely enclosed environments where the lubricants that are sprayed on the milling ends are filtered for metal.

I was a jeweler for a couple years and the common practice was to have carpet and a sticky trap at the door. The carpet was torn up every few years and used to throw a company vacation.

ortusdux• 2 years ago

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/

ainonsense442• 2 years ago

In March, 2022 video creator Klesh, who sells the paydirt he recovers from various areas, ...

Person, who makes money off people believing they can find treasure, makes video about how easy it is to find treasure. "Oh btw you can buy these utils for 25$ in my store."

Media literacy says : trust level 2/10, most probably lies and marketing

greyface-• 2 years ago

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

pianoben• 2 years ago

I love this guy's channel! It's interesting, unpretentious, and he has such a wealth of chemical and metallurgical knowledge. The reactions and processes he shows are amazing.

sumtechguy• 2 years ago

I watch this channel a lot. He has a few where he is refining electronic waste. He usually says that is not really worth it due to the time it takes him to do it and small amounts he gets and can get easily lost in the different stages of extraction. Most of the stuff he does is estate sales and melting down that.

nielsbot• 2 years ago

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.

pjd73• 2 years ago

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).

doctor_eval2• 2 years ago

Curious where that was? My partner was a jeweller in the Nicholas Building in Melbs.

pjd73• 2 years ago

250 Pitt St Sydney around 2002-2003.

candeira• 2 years ago

A friend of mine had an art studio at the Nicholas Building, and I got to speak with a jeweller who told me that he still did a lot of bespoke work in wedding rings, especially for tradies who would otherwise wear down store-bought rings because they were solid gold and therefore softer. I don't remember the details, but he specialised in harder alloys that are nevertheless mostly gold, and therefore "good as gold" for a wedding ring.

Would that be your partner?

ironmagma• 2 years ago

But do you pronounce it “jew-el-ry” or “jull-uh-ry”?

janderson215• 2 years ago

Probably jew-el-ery

dorkwood• 2 years ago

In Australia, it's neither. It's jool-ry.

loudmax• 2 years ago

Wandering off topic here, but fans of Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior) may remember Emil Minty as The Feral Kid. He only had a few other roles as a child actor, then went on to become a professional jeweler. According to one podcast, he was already fashioning necklaces out of the tabs from discarded cans on set. In the end, a far healthier career choice than many other child actors of the same era.

pregseahorses• 2 years ago

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.

notJim• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the stories of people in NYC's diamond district making their living by looking for dropped gemstones and tiny bits of gold.

https://nypost.com/2011/06/20/got-his-mined-in-the-gutter/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfrqUNFtM6A

kjkjadksj2• 2 years ago

I'm wondering how these gemstones even make their way on the street. Are jewelry workshops really so messy and flippant with this product that it presumably gets caught up on people and just falls off their clothes when they leave from work? Is it from crappy stone settings falling off immediately on leaving the stores? Seems so strange to me how such a valuable product ends up dispersed in the environment like this.

jaggederest2• 2 years ago

There's a Cody's Lab video where they refine highway dust for platinum group metals leaking from catalytic converters:

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

ainonsense442• 2 years ago

That video is a guy selling a dream, to sell his own products to the viewer, who believe in the legitimacy of the findings shown in the video.

I call marketing stunt. Most unlikely not a truthful representation of what to expect when doing it yourself.

blackbaze• 2 years ago

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.

CrispyKerosene• 2 years ago

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.

kjkjadksj2• 2 years ago

Seems like this is only netting you $8 or so.

https://old.reddit.com/r/jewelry/comments/vno1to/question_re...

Suppafly3• 2 years ago

That's what they're charging to collect it at the end, not necessarily what the actual value is, although the value is low enough that they just collect all their scraps once or twice a year and sell them in a lot instead of messing with each individual piece per client otherwise.

xcv1232• 2 years ago

That sounds miserable and desperate. A couple of dollars worth of scrap shavings. What will you do with that? Just let them have it.

mtnGoat9• 2 years ago

Yea it’s like people that bring in their dead ancestors teeth, no one wants to buy an old tooth and certainly not one with $5 worth of gold in it.

COGlory2• 2 years ago

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.

7thpower2• 2 years ago

I would just get a Roomba, bling it out, and then destroy it when it ripped one of my charger cables out of the wall.

Or just get sheet vinyl or something.

eru3• 2 years ago

A carpet is probably better at holding on to particles as people walk over it.

A vinyl sheet will just lose it to people's boots.

10k$ over ten years is also not that much per day. So he might be happy to make the trade-off for having a nice carpet.

00N82• 2 years ago

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!

dredmorbius2• 2 years ago

Do you have a source on that?

I'm finding "The Manhattan Project: the Important Role Silver Played In the Building of the Atomic Bomb" <https://discover.hubpages.com/education/The-Manhattan-Projec...> (2015).

00N82• 2 years ago

I think I first heard about it in a Scott Manley video - maybe this one, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JNT28WKAxgs - & read more on Wikipedia & possibly elsewhere

glompers2• 2 years ago

Here's a more official source: https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Event...

Groves' deputy, Nichols, who was responsible for the loan, also told the story in more detail in 1987 memoir, "The Road to Trinity."

jaggederest2• 2 years ago

Another fun Manhattan fact: They needed a code name for plutonium, so they called it "copper", but what was a poor scientist or engineer who needed to use actual copper to do? The official code name for copper was "Honest-to-God copper".

thinkfaster• 2 years ago

And they wondered how the Soviets infiltrated the project so thoroughly.

drunkonvinyl• 2 years ago

Nothing like H2GCu. It’s even just pennies on the dollar.

fbdab1033• 2 years ago

I am intrigued at how much thought went into "copper". Was the thinking that everyone's eyes would glaze over at such a common material? My initial reaction would be to use a different rare element. However, a rare element might draw more scrutiny to the casual observer. Then again, the potential for confusion is incredibly high. Interesting spycraft.

Supposedly the opsec at the Manhattan Project was so good, significant portions of the workforce had no idea on what they were laboring. Post war interviews thought the facility was all a sham, dedicated to nothing but medical testing.

JoshTriplett• 2 years ago

That sounds like the start of a story that ends up with wires made out of plutonium.

Anotheroneagain• 2 years ago

They called Polonium cobalt.

Think about it, cobalt is too slow. Polonium is ideal - you need a much smaller amount, and in five years it's gone, ten years, it's undetectable. Except that it decays into a specific isotope of lead, which could raise some questions, but you call it a toxin, and hope that the evidence gets destroyed in the process...

retrac• 2 years ago

There is a story to go with that story. The colonel responsible for the negotiations with the Treasury would later recall:

He explained the procedure for transferring the silver and asked, "How much do you need?" I replied, "6000 tons."
"How many troy ounces is that?" he asked. In fact, I did not know how to convert troy ounces to tons, and neither did he. A little impatient, I responded, "I don't know how many troy ounces we need, but I know I need 6000 tons - that is a definite quantity. What difference does it matter how we express the quantity?"
He replied rather indignantly, "Young man, you may think of silver in tons, but the Treasury will always think of silver in troy ounces."

umanwizard4• 2 years ago

If anyone else was curious like me, 6000 US tons is 175 million troy ounces.

michaelmcdonald• 2 years ago

For those wondering like me:

6000 metric tons of silver is approximately 192,904,200 troy ounces, and 6000 US tons of silver is approximately 175,000,000 troy ounces.

itishappy• 2 years ago

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.

whycome• 2 years ago

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/india/gold-from-the-gu...

WalterBright• 2 years ago

Use a magnet!

Edit: oops, never mind

eru3• 2 years ago

Magnets only really work for iron.

askvictor• 2 years ago

It's a little more complicated than that - gold is a little bit magnetic, and heat or light can increase this magnetism

bayouborne• 2 years ago

So does that mean it's possible to develop a magnetic 'figure-print' for gold?

cancerhacker• 2 years ago

In the north east, in spring, we’d use magnets to collect iron filings in the street from the snow plows. It was just a thing we’d do, no financial interest. We’d keep our haul in 35mm film canisters (as was the style at the time!)

interroboink• 2 years ago

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/

hilbert423• 2 years ago

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.

ars• 2 years ago

It mostly ends up in landfill. At some point we may be resource poor, and but energy rich and we'll use Plasma mass separation to separate each element out and reuse the valuable ones. Until then it's safely stored there.

hilbert423• 2 years ago

No doubt most valuable elements do end up in landfill and most will ultimately be recovered, but we still need to have a good handle of what's actually lost or doesn't make it there, and or how much leaches out before recovery. (Here we don't seem to have decent figures, if anyone knows of any authoritative references please post them.)

Hopefully, as you suggest, we will eventually be energy rich and can afford mass separation techniques to recover these elements. Nevertheless, unless some very cleaver as yet uninvented techniques are used then the amount of energy involved would likely be enormous (but I'm almost certain such techniques will be available in the foreseeable future).

Incidentally, for the same reason, I'm not overly worried about the necessity for having inordinately long-term storage for nuclear waste (hundreds of thousands of years), as in an energy-rich world there'd be enough energy to enable the use of transmutation techniques (along with fast breeders, etc.) to ensure these dangerous byproducts are 'burnt' to harmless materials. Basically, whilst nuclear waste is a big problem it's a comparatively short-term one.

That said, we're doing a pretty poor job of repurifying recycled materials now and the reasons are multifold. I'll give an example I've come across but there are hundreds more. Batteries of any kind should never be thrown away because of the valuable materials they contain. To my knowledge, with the exception of lead-acid batteries, an unknown amount of used battery material is recycled annually, but the effectiveness of what is actually recycled is limited due (it seems†) to the difficulty of repurifying said materials.

For example, recycled reagents and other components, depolarizers such as manganese dioxide, are (often?) insufficiently pure to ensure a battery's long-term storage life. Instead of say an alkaline cell having a nominal storage life of about six years, impure components contain unwanted ionic/conductive materials that lead to a much increased self-discharge rate that shortens shelf life (I've seen such cells become discharged in only about one third the time of those with well-purified materials).

No doubt higher levels of purification would be achieved if more energy were inputted into re-refining these materials. That said, this re-refining problem isn't just limited to batteries but is intrinsic to many recycling processes. Probably the best known and most problematic is that of separating used plastics together with their cracking/depolymerization. Again, it's almost certain these problems would be eliminated if enough cheap energy were available.

† Obviously, repurifying recycled materials is different to their original refining from ores etc. as repurifying processes would be required to remove unwanted materials that were never present in the original refining process. I am unclear about what this involves and or the extent of its deployment as there seems precious little information about it in the public domain.

foota2• 2 years ago

There's discussion about mining landfills to recover these kinds of materials. When you rememeber we had to dig it all out of the ground, taking it from a dump seems pretty convenient!

hilbert423• 2 years ago

Right, see my reply to ars.

dehrmann• 2 years ago

Depending on the age of the landfill, you can find refined aluminum or iron at higher rates than are in ore.

gnicholas• 2 years ago

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!

GarnetFloride• 2 years ago

Hospitals used to have on-site laundry, for community sanitation and hygiene reasons. of course that was done away with for profit reasons.

sundvor• 2 years ago

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?

schlauerfox2• 2 years ago

Generally Gold (aurium) is not bioreactive, it's hardly reactive at all hence it's lustre in the wild since it doesn't tarnish or bond easily. Goldschlager has gold flake in it for human consumption. It's generally considered safe to consume for this reason. The quantity to make an LD50 of inhaled gold would be considerable I imagine, but have no data.

simonjgreen• 2 years ago

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.

rhplus• 2 years ago

A surprising number of people forget the majority of most jewellery value is the raw material.

Scrap value, yes, purchase price, no :)

The quick sanity test is to ask why big name jewelers can sell the same style ring at all sizes for the same price, despite perhaps 25% difference in mass. The majority of the retail sales price is not the precious metal value.

thenickdude• 2 years ago

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

EE84M3i• 2 years ago

How do the taxes work for this?

ajb• 2 years ago

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

fest• 2 years ago

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.

DonHopkins• 2 years ago

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!)

surfingdino• 2 years ago

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...

mk_stjames• 2 years ago

  >  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.

alexpotato• 2 years ago

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.

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

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