If you’ve ever walked around an old industrial site hunting for precious metal scrap, you know that the search can be overwhelming. You examine heaps of dirt, piles of chemicals hiding in the bushes, old steel drums that contain dried or wet sediment, streams where chemicals and byproducts were once deposited, and all kinds of other places that could be hiding precious metal scrap. Although you cannot identify most precious metal scrap just by looking at it, here’s a quick visual guide to some of the materials that can often be refined profitably in our precious metals refinery.

Have you ever seen sparks flying when someone was using an arc welder or oxyacetylene welding torch? The sparks you see are little bits of molten metal that fall to the floor as powder and then cool. If silver is contained in the metals being bonded (or if it is contained in the rods used for brazing, as it often is), it will fall to the floor where it will be swept up – maybe by a young employee like I was, at the end of the day.