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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!
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".
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."
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).
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).
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.
Curious where that was? My partner was a jeweller in the Nicholas Building in Melbs.
But do you pronounce it “jew-el-ry” or “jull-uh-ry”?
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/
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Here's a series of videos showing the recovery and refining process:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like you are ready to open a crematorium that specializes in former jewelers.
> 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!
Hospitals used to have on-site laundry, for community sanitation and hygiene reasons. of course that was done away with for profit reasons.
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.
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.
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.
Reminds me of Cody's Lab refining platinum from roadside dust from the highway: (due to catalytic converters)
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.
Seems like this is only netting you $8 or so.
https://old.reddit.com/r/jewelry/comments/vno1to/question_re...
That sounds miserable and desperate. A couple of dollars worth of scrap shavings. What will you do with that? Just let them have it.
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?
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.
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
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!)
How do the taxes work for this?