The platinum group metals - platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, and ruthenium look pretty much the same. They are all bright, shiny white metals that do not tarnish. And if you’re dealing with platinum group metal scrap – the stuff that is left over after different industrial processes – it all looks pretty much the same. 

What is the most valuable and sought-after precious metal today?

If you ask a group of precious metal investors that question, chances are that most of them will say, “Iridium!” And there are reasons for that. One is that iridium is now trading for more than $6,000/Troy Ounce, which is a very high price. Another reason is that most of those investors have never seen iridium because it is so rare. So it’s mysterious, kind of like unicorns. Everybody can describe a unicorn, but nobody has ever seen one. 

We recently visited the Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. What a display!

More than 130 meteorites are displayed there, including the huge 34-ton Cape York Meteorite, also known as Ahnighito.  That monstrous meteorite contains mostly iron. 

That display got us wondering about the metallic content of all those meteorites, all of which had literally fallen from the sky. Did they contain gold or other precious metals?

Iridium, one of the platinum group metals, is worth a lot of money. It is trading at about $6,000 per Troy Ounce. 

That’s a high trading price. But before you go hunting for this white shiny metal, please read our post today. Although iridium is worth a lot of money, it is really hard to find. So our advice to you is to understand iridium, but to place it low on the list of precious metals you are hunting for.

But We Predict Demand for Them Will Only Continue to Rise

LKAB, a government-owned Swedish mining company, recently discovered Europe’s largest deposit of rare earth metals in northern Sweden. The possibility of mining significant quantities of these rare elements in Europe is big news.

We have written many posts about recycling and getting paid for platinum. Today, we would like to explore a related topic - platinum group metals. What are they? And what do you need to know to make money by collecting and recycling them?

The trading price of platinum is not about to go down. One reason? With every new year, platinum is finding new applications in healthcare and medicine.

Let’s take a closer look.

For today’s post, we’d like to put on our science fiction glasses and think about what the world could look like in year 2050. We admit that it is unlikely that all the following conditions will have arisen by then, but let’s consider them anyway . . .

If you’re on the hunt for platinum scrap, you could sweep the floors at a jewelry factory, pull up old drain pipes and floorboards you find there, or tweezer out bits of old platinum screens and sponge from plating tanks and drains.

That’s hard work. There are much easier places to find platinum . . .

Platinum is used in jewelry, thermocouples, catalytic converters and many other places.

That should mean that it is easy to find bits and chunks of platinum scrap that we can recycle profitably for you, correct? Well yes, there is a lot of the metal out there waiting for you to discover. But you must know where to look.

Today’s post is a bit different from others that you have read on this blog in the past. We’re not going to focus on precious metal investments that you can make today. Instead, we’re going to take a long-term look at trends in space exploration and aeronautics that you should be aware of – trends that could reshape the world of precious metals in the future.

Chances are that you only find small quantities of the valuable secondary platinum group metals (palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium, and osmium) hiding in recyclable items that you think are made only of platinum. How can you tell if these rarer metals are present?