Waste Not Want Not
A Bench Jewelers Guide to Scrap Material Management
When it comes to recovering precious metal, nothing is worthless. However, when you walk into many repair shops you will find people behaving as if it were. Many people do not realize what a valuable asset their scrap is, and have been pleasantly surprised by the amount of additional revenues received from a refiner when a clean and orderly shop is maintained.
A dirty shop affects profits, because of the high value of the metal that is lost. Small pieces of gold on the floor from filing, buffing, and other operations in the shop, cling to the bottom of shoes. If the floor is not swept regularly, the gold literally walks out the door of the shop. If not collected at the source, gold dust is spread around the shop. It is then carried out of the shop on workers’ hands, clothes, and shoes.
Establish Cleaning Procedures
To keep your bench clean a procedure needs to be followed. At least once a day clean your lap tray on your bench. At the end of the day, sweep the floor. Do this while the jobs you worked on are in the cleaner. Perform a more complete job once a month. I must emphasize here this is not extra time you need to find, it is time you would spend looking for stones etc., if you did not do the cleaning. It is not spending more time it is just spending the time differently. If your bench and shop are organized and you clean regularly it does not take that much time.
Additional revenues from the refiner are pure profits. No additional time is spent, remember you spend the time either cleaning or looking for items you dropped; there is no additional cost involved. Since you already are sending sweeps to the refiner, it does not cost any more to send the additional sweeps.
Scrap Material Storage
In the jewelry shop, you need to keep five different containers to keep your scrap materials separated. Do not throw an old gold mounting into a container with the polishing waste and filters. You will not receive the full amount of money for that ring. You need to send it in with other mountings. For highest return, you need to keep your scrap separated.
Scrap Metal
The first three containers are for pieces of clean metal. This would include anything from old ring mountings to old crowns. Place any piece of metal large enough to pick up with your fingers in these containers. This needs to be clean material. Clean off all dirt and flux or boric acid, before placing into these containers and remove all stones, tags and stickers from the jewelry. These containers are for metal only.
Keep a separate container for Gold, Silver, and Platinum. Depending on the refiner you use, the gold and silver may be combined. Some refiners charge an extra fee to process the silver out of the gold. This makes it worth while to keep these metals separated. Always keep Platinum scrap separate from gold and silver. It is not possible to profitably refine a small amount of platinum out of a large quantity of gold and silver.
These containers are for karat gold, silver, and platinum metals only. Do not contaminate them with gold filled, gold plate, or any base metal jewelry. Place these into container #5 or a separate container for them.
Scrap Management continued