Because gold was cheaper in years past, it was commonly used to decorate all kinds of relatively inexpensive items that can be easy to find – and undervalued - today.

Here are some common gold-plated and gold-filled items and forms of gold scrap that are worth snapping up in today’s market.

When your great uncle Charles retired after working for Firestone for about 50 years, he got a gold watch. And then when you saw him last Christmas, he said to you, “Can you find out whether this thing is really made of gold, and let me know what it is worth?”

...When You Recycle These Gold-Plated Items

While you’re poking around at the antiques mall you notice a pair of gold-plated earrings sitting in a tray. You could snag them for less than $10.00, but why bother? They are going to contain only maybe 50 cents worth of gold at best. So you walk on by and keep looking for more interesting items.

What about the gold-toned Oscars that are given to Academy Award winners? They are only plated with a very thin layer of 24-karat gold. Even though they stand 13.5 inches tall and weigh more than eight pounds, they still don’t contain enough gold to recycle for a significant amount of money. But there is value in some trophies, medals and awards...

Shakespeare once wrote, “All that glitters is not gold.” If he had thought about it, he could have written something similar about silver, platinum, rhodium, and other precious metals. The fact is that some shiny things that look like they should be worth a lot of money really aren’t. They either don’t contain any precious metals at all or they contain such small quantities that there is no point sending them to a qualified precious metals refinery like Specialty Metals Smelters and Refiners, because the cost of extracting those metals will be greater than the value of the metals themselves.