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...

Why look at online auction sites? Simply because they offer you the fastest way to examine hundreds and hundreds of different items that are for sale. You don’t have to travel to antique malls, estate sales, or live auctions. Just fire up your computer and start looking. 

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.

If you walk into an estate sale or antique shop, chances are good that you will find trophies, class rings, beer steins and tabletop cigarette lighters. They all found their way into many American homes in years gone by. Those items are so common that it is easy to forget that they often contain significant quantities of silver and gold that are well worth recycling.