Cost of refining gold

[DarkspARCS]

I was just trying to have a little fun within a thread that was a dead horse from the gate.

The cost to refine has always been a personal thing on an individual basis, because of three factors.

Who you acquire your materials from (or for that matter how you go about making them),

the time needed to produce the amount of effort required to provide a product, dependant upon your technique,

and the qualification and quantification of the material being used as source.

That being stated, all one has to do is stabilize these three factors to then afford to calculate a personal cost to refine, compared against an industry prospectus.

 

[DarkspARCS]

That being the case, I may owe someone an apology, not knowing where it was originally posted.

I was beginning to think my condition has deteriorated so bad that I was going to need to start wearing a body cam lmao...

 

[nwinther]

Even this calculation will not get you an answer that is reliable again because of exactly what was refined and how , then you add in bonus metals such as silver or PGMs which will consume chemicals and time to recover but not be reported in the amount of income earned just looking at gold refined.
The only thing you can calculate is if you are actually making a profit , total all expenses and subtract that from sales and stock in hand and that is your answer.
You can easily calculate what your cost per gram is but that may well have no relation to others costs.

Well even if unreliable, it's better than nothing. Sure, it's individual, and an average cost/gram (or whatever) is exatcly that - an (individual) average. So when you process plated scrap, don't expect to yield the average (or whatever).
Just as in any business, any company account will be different than any other company's account, as there are local or industrial differences that are difficult or impossible to account/adjust for to a certainty. That doesn't make other companies' cost of operation uninteresting or irrelevant or wrong or definite.

 

[KalleMP]

Ok, thank you all for participating.

The consensus was that even an estimate is almost impossible to make. For many good and valid reasons, location will affect chemical cost a lot, type of scrap varies massively and the The very valid point of needing a outlet for selling your gold may preclude any return on the gold value.

The only thing you can calculate is if you are actually making a profit ,

The point above is probably the heart of the matter.

So I will rephrase my question as follows.

Has any hobby, part time, small scale refiner shown a profit when paying for everything (except time) and how much below spot did you have to buy your scrap gold to become profitable?

It is such a tempting and appealing hobby but I have enough hobbies and do not want to embark on a new one if it is a guaranteed money pit. I would love to investigate at some point and have much of the equipment but it would be nice to say I earn €1/h, €10/h or €100/h for my efforts.

 

[Shark]

Has any hobby, part time, small scale refiner shown a profit when paying for everything (except time) and how much below spot did you have to buy your scrap gold to become profitable?

Simple answer “yes”.

Maybe I worded my previous post wrong. I have not lost money after my second year of learning to refine. Broke even once in the last five years, to me that is as good as a loss. The rest has been profitable. I could have easily turned this hobby into a business but my health did not want to cooperate. I have slowed way down these days and can still profit an ounce or two a month when not doing other pleasurable things. If you want to start a business then only you can determine if it is worth it to you. I found a local notch that needed filling and worked my way into it. I have saved all my escrap the past 5 years. I processed 10 to 20 pounds of gold filled a month, until this last health bout. I might do an ounce of karat gold a month at times. And I have turned down doing escrap for others more times than I can or want to count.

I feel if you have to ask this question you may need to work on your refining skills a bit more. Read through the forum and you can see where many members have went into business successfully. In the same time I have seen many come and go when they realized just how much work is involved. The amount of time it takes to learn enough to make a profit is no small feat in itself.

The real question you needed answered is “do I know enough to do this as a business?”, and only you can answer that.

 

[nickvc]

Just as an aside to your question we often get asked how much gold is in a certain piece or pieces of e scrap.
The real question should be how much gold can I get from the scrap and that will depend on your knowledge and skill and the equipment you have to help in the processes and also which processes you opt for to recover your gold.
Smaller quantities normally have a greater loss percentage because some of your gold may be in your filter paper or melt dish etc.
While we can say we recovered x amount it does not mean you will or can, certain processes such as processing with cyanide rarely recovers all the gold if you are processing mixed materials because once the base metals are exposed the solution will preferentially dissolve them so knowing the scrap should yield exactly that amount from assays you rarely get that full amount.
My point is you can only rely on what you get not on what others claim , your progress and or success should be based on your results especially as a small time / hobby refiner.

 

[goldshark]

The only way I have ever broken even, was by going to garage sales and finding an occasional treasure, Finding small stuff on the street, or processing some placer Gold I bought in a fire sale. All was obtained at say, half of the spot paid for a weighed 14K piece of jewelry, for example. E waste is virtually a wash, mostly a loss. If you can get people to pay you for disposing of E waste, I think that is the only way to potentially make money.

 

[hoytSmith]

Hi Good people,

There was a thread about the rising price of gold just recently.

I have a different question, not expecting anyone to give up any trade secrets but to give a potential refiner another data point to decide if an offer of e-waste or low karat or plated jewellery is a viable deal.

When starting out a lot of cost is in apparatus but when refining regularly the shift is to consumables. It is the consumable cost that I am most interested in.

So for those who keep track of such things and don't mind giving an approximate guide price please offer your estimate.

Distilled water, gas, electricity, filter papers, silver, chemicals are the interesting things. If one of them stands out as a deal breaker or as irrelevant, mention that as well if you like. Lastly if you are not keeping a very low profile mention the country you operate in.

Price in your currency of choice or convert to Euros and make the price per gramme so it is easy to be sure of the units.

Basically what is the cost X to refine Y gramme of gold into a button of your estimated Z fineness.
If you want to indicate how much it costs to re-refine that would also be useful.

I have a project to recover PGM’s from a limited quantity of what is otherwise waste. I won’t know what it will cost until I’m done and I do the math.

If I had a continuous process, I could provide a number based on my proceeds less costs, but that’s an accounting problem: Equipment you buy once, space is time-valued, Chemicals, supplies & services you buy continuously, money you get when you sell what you’ve produced. Every scenario will have a different result. You might be able to ask for something more limited: “What can you tell me about refining 100 memory cards from the 1990’s” or how much to process 100kg of honeycomb catalytic converters from toyota — I don’t know — but you might as well have asked “How much does it cost to run a restaurant” — without more. So, maybe pick a realistic candidate material you can actually obtain, search the forum to make sure the question hasn’t been asked & answered, then try again with a very specific & detailed question and fill in any blanks with info from the web/locally (price of filter papers, etc)

 

[Heavy-Black-Sand]

A big contributor to cost over-looked for a commercial operation i didn't see mentioned here is "rent" ..... in the Greater Vancouver area, where i live, the increases in rent over the past several years (for both commercial & residential) has been something to behold ..... for many people up here who do not own their own real estate, a very very large portion of their income now is going towards just paying the rent.

 

[4metals]

The cost of refining gold depends on so many factors and they all have been mentioned on this thread. I believe, from reading what the OP posted, he is looking to be a refinery start up. If that is the case, most successful startups have followed similar paths. First and foremost, determine what it is you want to target as a scrap-type and figure out a realistic quantity you can keep your operation running with. This usually means starting small and letting your business gains finance growth. Too many have dreams of grandeur and over build only to realize they have boxed themselves into perpetual debt.
You will be amazed how much jewelers karat gold scrap one can process in a 4' exhaust hood and a small gas melt furnace. Start small, do your research first, and don't overreach. Keep those principles in mind as you succeed because the market will change. Jewelry manufacturing centers move and go over-seas. E-scrap generates less and less yield per ton the newer the "old" circuitry gets. Margins change. But new scrap-types emerge. 15 years ago who would have thought there would be a scrap type known as crematory scrap?

 

[snoman701]

15 years ago who would have thought there would be a scrap type known as crematory scrap?

The people processing it 15 years ago. The only reason the people processing it 15 years ago lost the accounts is because they were not paying competitively for it. They don't care though, they are loaded. Now it's out in the open. I've melted more crematory scrap than I care to think about.

All of the small streams of scrap that are big enough to support a small business will dry up as bigger businesses absorb the waste streams. Even e-scrap buyers are now in greater competition against each other, as well as a global buyers.

You can still hustle a living, but it's gotten a lot harder.

 

[4metals]

Crematory scrap is typically melt and sample and ship. Requires only a furnace, the proper way to flux it, and the proper way to sample it. almost a non-refiners scrap-type.
Processing the PM's is a different story, that is actually refining.

 

[TBoom27]

I don’t post much but everything above is right. There is no good answer. I refine a few types of materials and at a large enough scale I can estimate the cost. That said, it is all based on experience with the material and processes. I have not lost money but:

1) Obtaining material is where money is made. Knowing what you want and cost of goods that allows profit is the only way to do this. Meaning you, by experience, are going to have to figure out your processing costs and then back that into what your material costs need to be to have a profit margin you can live with. This will change over time as your process improves but it’s the only way to know.

Hobby vs Income matters. if you can make $40 per hours at a job, then refining for $10 per hour is costing you $30 an hour. If it’s how you want to make a living. I’m not against entrepreneurs but it is something one needs to think about before gold fever sets in.

For me, I make a profit because it’s not my job, so I don’t count time. There is no way I can get the volume of material to change that without competing with the big guys and I don’t see how I win that. Basically, time is not a consideration for me, its a hobby, one that pays for itself and a nice bit more, but hobby. I can say I would never “work“ for what the hourly profit I get from refining.

in any case, the only way to know is to know your material and specific processing and waste disposal costs, based on your setup, and calculate it from there. Each of these variables are too different to give a general number.

 

[snoman701]

Crematory scrap is typically melt and sample and ship. Requires only a furnace, the proper way to flux it, and the proper way to sample it. almost a non-refiners scrap-type.
Processing the PM's is a different story, that is actually refining.

Absolutely! Crematory precious is primarily dental, though there is some weird zinc gold palladium alloy that always showed up that I never understood. But it's been being recycled for a long long time...the mentality just changed. Someone said "hey, grandma's hip is a high nickel moly cobalt alloy". So now all of the orthopedic implants are being saved as well and we call it recycling, whereas before the hush hush nature kept it more socially inline with grave robbing. If people knew that grandmas gold crown was being sold out the back, they'd be pissed....but now if they ask, and you say "after cremation, any metallic portion is collected and recycled" it's entirely socially acceptable.

The orthopedic implants are being saved as foundry melt additive. It's not clean enough to be arc melt scrap, so they sell it to the steel foundries and it gets added to a melt to bring up nickel/moly/ cobalt.

 

[Shark]

though there is some weird zinc gold palladium alloy that always showed up that I never understood

Off the three stents that I have one of them has some palladium alloy in it. It has been a while but I might be able to find the information card they gave me for it.

 

[4metals]

Off the three stents that I have one of them has some palladium alloy in it. It has been a while but I might be able to find the information card they gave me for it.

Well let’s hope we won’t be recycling your stents for a long time!

 

[snoman701]

It was the zinc that always confused me. Zinc is too reactive to have in the body. I was told it was from the trim on the casket. But it carried 10%+ Au and 1-5% Pd. My guess is that it was just the occasional pfm getting mixed in, but who knows.

 

[4metals]

So now all of the orthopedic implants are being saved as well and we call it recycling,

Yup, most have a gaylord for titanium and a gaylord for chrome cobalt. Not something the customer is paid on I’m told but a 4x4 gaylord full is worth some money.

I have seen zinc casket trim and handles be gold plated, perhaps that is what your XRF is picking up. Likely a thin plating that migrated into the alloy in the incineration process so it didn’t look gold and shiny. Next time I see them, I’ll snip off a sample and cupel it, probably produces more fume when it melts than it’s worth. The Palladium is a mystery though.

 

[snoman701]

I have seen zinc casket trim and handles be gold plated, perhaps that is what your XRF is picking up. Likely a thin plating that migrated into the alloy in the incineration process so it didn’t look gold and shiny. Next time I see them, I’ll snip off a sample and cupel it, probably produces more fume when it melts than it’s worth. The Palladium is a mystery though.

Those were XRF off a homogenized pin from a 5 lb melt, so not simply surface readings. My guess is that it was mis sorted material. That company was moving significant amounts of materials.

 

[GoIdman]

Ok, thank you all for participating.

The consensus was that even an estimate is almost impossible to make. For many good and valid reasons, location will affect chemical cost a lot, type of scrap varies massively and the The very valid point of needing a outlet for selling your gold may preclude any return on the gold value.

The point above is probably the heart of the matter.

So I will rephrase my question as follows.

Has any hobby, part time, small scale refiner shown a profit when paying for everything (except time) and how much below spot did you have to buy your scrap gold to become profitable?

It is such a tempting and appealing hobby but I have enough hobbies and do not want to embark on a new one if it is a guaranteed money pit. I would love to investigate at some point and have much of the equipment but it would be nice to say I earn €1/h, €10/h or €100/h for my efforts.

My approach to things is the amount of gold it holds, and from there I build the price estimate for an item. (yes it needs time for you to learn the amounts , and you have to be focusing on specific material)

For ex.: 1 ceramic CPU (high yield) holds between 0.1 and 0.2 gr of gold therefore if only calculating the gold value 0.15(average if multiple brand proc.)*50(1 gr of 22k gold at pawn shop)=7,5 USD worth of gold. It means if I wanted to make a profit by recovery&refining than I am not willing to pay more than 1 USD per processor. The rest of calculations is based on experience with such material. Remember, this is also a rough estimate since you costs can raise with input excess time, excess chemicals, waste treatment, etc.

Hope it helps since you wanted numbers, i have shared one type of approach to this matter.

Pete