Not All Smelted Ingots are Created Equal!
When we melt recycled metals into bars at Mid-States Recycling and Refining many people think we produce pure gold, silver, platinum or palladium bars or ingots. Not true! The real goal is to melt an assortment of precious metals together, pour into a mold and bring forth a solid homogeneous bar containing all of the metals that we melted. We can test a small sample of the batch once it’s melted and resolidified to determine the exact composition of the bar and to establish the actual and accurate value of the bar itself. We then sourcer the bars to fabricators who then extract specific alloys from the bars to use in their respective industries.
To get the best possible outcome we must add a flux to the melt to aid in the binding of the individual types of metals and the flux will also lower the melting point of the precious metals. The flux also acts as a cleaning agent to remove impurities in the batch. These impurities become slag that will rise to the top in the mold and can be removed from the bar itself instead of remaining and reducing the purity of the metals. Copper is also added to aid in the binding of the bar’s contents. The bar itself is an alloy of a mixture of precious metals.
To put things in more of a monetary value perspective, a pure gold bar in the size of an iPhone 6 would be worth over $38,000 USD. A bar the size of what’s traded on the Commodities Exchange (a 400 troy oz “good delivery bar”) is worth a staggering $498,000 USD!
The most common precious metals in post-cremation recycling (in order of approximate value) are -
Gold ($1,195 USD per troy ounce)
Palladium ($1,050 USD/troy oz)
Platinium ($788 USD/troy oz)
Silver ($14.10 USD/troy oz)
Cobalt ($15 USD/pound)
With the high value of each metal, sorting prior to processing becomes very important, not only because you could be leaving money in the processor, but your families don’t expect nor want metal fragments in with the cremated remains of their loved one.
Make sure your operators are sorting ferrous metals with a magnet and non-ferrous metals visually removing them from the cremated remains by hand. Because these non-ferrous metals are much more valuable, it is important that you don’t skip the visual sort! An effective and thorough sort will reap far more gains than not AND will save you from wearing out your processor blades as an added bonus!
To learn more about the recycling and refining of post-cremation metals give us a call. We would love to tell you more and invite you to our facility to see the process in person!