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Recycling Gold For A Low-Carbon Future

Published Tuesday 30th November 2021

gold bars

After this year’s UN Climate Conference, COP26, hosted in Glasgow, industries such as the gold market are under pressure to embrace greater sustainability. Selling more scrap gold could be just the ticket to helping make gold much greener. That’s because a large chunk of the world’s gold supply is recycled.

Benefits of recycling gold

You only need to look at costs to assess why recycling is preferable to sourcing gold through mining. The gold price is high, reflecting how ideal it is for selling any gold you have. Gold mining, which ultimately sources most of the world’s gold, also comes at a high price, but to the planet at large. For every troy ounce the world produces, 0.8 tonnes of CO2e are emitted. If we are to put all of our eggs into the gold mining basket, we only add to the scale of our climate challenge.

Recycling gold, on the other hand, is significantly more convenient to do, helps you make some money and also saves tonnes of carbon from being emitted through mining. It all starts with simply selling gold you already have, to Scrap Gold UK. Gold is seen as having great intrinsic value, hardly oxidising, and it can be melted down and reshaped into new items over and over again without losing that shine.

The World Gold Council estimated that 28 per cent of the world’s gold was sourced through recycling alone in 2020. It’s a tried and tested practice which has been carried out for generations. At times when supplies of gold were scarce, mines ran dry and the gold rush was seemingly over, melting down and recycling existing gold was the next best thing. In a modern context, it is significantly less costly to the planet, and keeps supply chains in a more circular resource loop. Why dig for more gold, when we’ve got plenty to recycle up on the surface?

The golden circle

Recycling gold is just one aspect of what is touted as a circular economy: a world in which resources can be consumed, recycled and reused before the process is repeated ad infinitum. By setting our sights away from plundering the planet for more resources, recycling is a natural approach which helps maintain a circular economy within the gold market. By selling scrap gold with Scrap Gold UK, for example, you are helping reduce demand for fresh gold to be mined, by providing more of it ready to be recycled.

Not only do mines produce carbon through their activities, but also often release toxic waste products into the environment. Lower demand for mined gold means less of these nasty side effects. It’s a rebalancing act, and you could be pivotal in making it happen sooner rather than later.

Whether you possess rose gold or white gold, dental gold or jewellery, this precious metal can come in all shapes and sizes. Scrap Gold UK are gold specialists who have been helping facilitate sales of gold for a number of years now. If gold is to maintain its shine, it should also embrace the greener way of doing things. To learn more about selling gold, get in touch with us today.

What’s In A Silver Coin?

Published Monday 1st November 2021

As precious metals specialists, Scrap Gold UK receive items of all sorts. Silver coins, or coins purporting to be minted in silver, are some of the most common items people wish to sell to us, but before you do so, it always pays to know precisely which coins to look out for and which ones are more likely to be loose change.

History of silver coins

Silver coins were considered a measure of true value as far back as the Middle Ages. Often, these coins were minted with silver at the highest purity available, but those responsible for minting them soon realised they needed to be slightly less than pure (92.5 per cent to be precise), to ensure they could withstand regular wear and tear. The remaining 7.5 per cent was often filled in with copper. As a result, for much of English history, silver coins of the highest purity tended to be .925 purity at most.

However, if you have a load of old silver coins from days gone by, you need to be mindful of precisely when they were minted. Anything minted before 1920 is likely to retain that .925 purity, on the upper end of the purity scale, with that added bit of extra historical value. However, high production costs from 1920 onwards saw silver content in coinage decline substantially; by 1945, coins had closer to 50 per cent silver content, with the remainder plugged by manganese and other cheaper metals.

From 1947 onwards, virtually all ‘silver’ coins ended the use of silver in their minting entirely. This means if your coins are of the post-war vintage, it’s unlikely you’re in possession of actual silver coins unfortunately. By 2021, coins with that silvery look may trick you into thinking silver is back in fashion, but actually modern 5p, 20p and 50p coins make use of nickel-plated steel.

Pricing your coins

Silver coins often come in hauls or caches, passed down through the family, which you might want to sell all in one go. However, unless they date back to 1947 or earlier, they’re less likely to be attracting that 925 purity price. Otherwise, purity is likely to be lower than older variants. In more recent years, silver bullion coins have been minted by specific mints but you need to know what insignia and other signs to look for to know their precise origins.

At Scrap Gold UK, we have a Silver Scrap Calculator which gives you the chance to get a free valuation of items with a purity of at least 50 per cent. All you need is an idea for the item’s purity and its weight in grams. At present, a gram of 925 purity silver can be sold for 44p, lower than what you’d expect when selling a similar amount of gold, emphasising the importance of selling in bulk if you wish to sell small silver items at all.

Need an expert opinion on what your coins could be worth? Scrap Gold UK has received a fair share of coins, so we know what to look for, when it comes to high-purity silver items. Get in touch with us today by calling us on 01902 828 400.

Scrap Silver Calculator

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