Professional jewelry scrap refining
Pans, filters, floor matting, and drain traps. Metal migrates all over a working shop, and three metals routinely arrive mixed in a single lot.
Your Jewelry Scrap Refining Partner
Ask a jeweller where their waste is and they will point at the bench pan. The pan is real, but it is rarely the richest thing in the room. The extraction bag behind the polishing motor usually beats it, and the matting underfoot has been quietly collecting since the shop opened.
Our goldsmith scrap recovery work starts by naming every stream rather than just the obvious one: pans, filters, worn wheels, floor coverings, drain traps, and the vacuum cleaner. Each is kept separate at intake, because sweepings shed most of their weight as grit while lemel barely sheds any, and mixing them hides both results.
$15M+
Jewelry Scrap Recovered
Six Places Metal Hides in a Working Shop
Only the first will be somewhere you already look, and it is seldom the best of them
Bench Pans and Lemel
The filings and offcuts that fall into a bench pan during ordinary work are the cleanest waste a workshop produces, and the easiest to underestimate.
- ✓ Lemel accumulates from sawing, filing, and drilling, and a busy bench fills a pan faster than anyone expects
- ✓ Steel wool, saw blade fragments, and pin ends get magnetically separated out before valuation
- ✓ Emptying pans on a fixed schedule beats emptying them when somebody remembers
Polishing Dust and Buffing Residue
Every wheel throws metal into the air, and the dust settling behind a polishing motor holds a genuinely surprising quantity of it.
- ✓ Extraction bags and filters are the single richest waste stream in most workshops
- ✓ Rouge, tripoli, and wheel fibre have to be burned off before anything can be measured
- ✓ Wheels themselves hold embedded metal and are worth sending once they are worn out
Floor Sweepings and Matting
Metal migrates. It ends up in door mats, under benches, in the grooves of a wooden floor, and in the vacuum cleaner.
- ✓ Duckboards and bench matting are lifted and processed when a workshop is refitted or moved
- ✓ Floor sweepings carry more grit than metal, so expect a large weight reduction on processing
- ✓ Sink and drain traps in a working shop are worth clearing before anyone renovates
Three Metals, One Lot
Workshop waste rarely respects boundaries. Gold, silver, and platinum group metals arrive mixed together with no way to sort them by eye.
- ✓ Separation happens chemically during processing rather than by hand at intake
- ✓ Each metal is reported on its own line, so the platinum in a mixed lot is never lost inside a gold figure
- ✓ Benches working across several metals should say so, since it changes how the lot is routed
Production Offcuts and Failures
Sprues, buttons, casting failures, and pieces that came out of the mould wrong are the most concentrated waste a workshop generates.
- ✓ Investment plaster is removed before weighing, as it contributes bulk and nothing else
- ✓ Sprue trees and buttons from casting runs carry known alloy content and process quickly
- ✓ Rejected pieces are recorded separately in case a client later queries what happened to them
Standing Collection for Working Shops
Workshop waste accumulates whether anyone is paying attention, which makes a scheduled rhythm more useful than an occasional clear-out.
- ✓ Collection on an agreed cycle so pans and filters never overflow into the floor
- ✓ Running totals kept across deliveries rather than treating each as unrelated
- ✓ Records formatted so a bookkeeper can reconcile them without a phone call
Jewelry Scrap Refining Pricing
Volume-based precious metals refining fees
Jewelry Standard Volume
For an independent bench sending pans and filters a few times a year.
- ✓ Collection containers supplied for pans and filters
- ✓ Waste streams kept separate at intake
- ✓ Magnetic separation of steel and blade fragments
- ✓ Each metal reported on its own line
- ✓ Expected weight reduction explained beforehand
Jewelry High-Volume
For production benches and manufacturers generating waste continuously.
- ✓ Everything in Standard, plus:
- ✓ Standing collection on an agreed cycle
- ✓ Replacement pans and filters left on collection
- ✓ Running totals kept across every delivery
- ✓ Platinum group content tracked separately
- ✓ Pre-refit clearance planned in advance with you
Why a Schedule Beats a Clear-Out
Waste accumulates at a steady rate whether or not anyone attends to it. A pan left until it overflows disperses metal onto the floor, where recovering it becomes a matter of lifting matting rather than emptying a tray. The loss is small each week and considerable across a decade.
Quarterly suits most independent benches. Production shops usually settle on monthly. Standing collection means somebody arrives, takes the pans and filters, and leaves replacements, with running totals kept across deliveries so you can watch a trend rather than react to a series of unrelated figures. Refits are the exception: telephone weeks ahead, because matting and ducting go into skips.
Ready to Refine Your Jewelry Scrap?
Moving premises or refitting? Telephone before the skip arrives. Matting, ducting, and drain traps are recoverable right up until they are not.
Tell us which metals your bench handles, since platinum work changes how a lot gets routed and reported.
Jewelry Scrap Refining Results
Six streams that working shops routinely throw away, recovered before the skip arrived
Twenty Years of Duckboards
Bench matting lifted during a workshop move, having quietly caught filings since the shop opened
Church and Wellesley, Toronto
The Extraction Bag
A single polishing filter that a goldsmith had been throwing away every few months for years
Lansing, North York
Sprue Trees and Buttons
Casting offcuts with known alloy content, plaster removed before anything reached the scale
Cooksville, Mississauga
Platinum Hiding in Gold
A mixed bench lot where the platinum group content was reported on its own line rather than absorbed
Wexford, Scarborough
Drain Traps Before the Refit
Sink and drain traps cleared ahead of contractors arriving, which is the only time it can be done
Islington Village, Etobicoke
Worn Buffing Wheels
Retired wheels holding embedded metal throughout, sent instead of binned for the first time
Concord, Vaughan
What Jewelers Say
We were moving premises and the contractors were three days out. Somebody suggested telephoning before the skip arrived. The duckboards under my bench had been catching filings since 2003 and I was about to throw them in with the rubbish. Lifting them was worth more than the whole quarter's jewelry scrap refining had been. I tell every jeweller I know to ring before a refit, not after.
For years I binned the extraction bag behind the polisher because it looked like grey fluff. Someone here asked what I did with it and the answer clearly surprised them. It is now the single best thing I send. The incoming weight is mostly rouge and wheel fibre that burns off, which they explained upfront so the reduction never came as a shock.
My bench does gold and silver, and I added platinum work two years ago without thinking to mention it. Once I did, the reporting changed and platinum started appearing on its own line instead of vanishing into a gold total. Nobody at my previous processor had ever asked which metals I worked in. That one question was worth more than any percentage comparison.
Jewelry Scrap Refining FAQ
Where metal hides, why polishing dust matters, mixed metal benches, and what to do before a refit
Start Your Jewelry Scrap Refining Today
Tell Us Which Waste Streams Your Bench Actually Produces
List what you currently collect and, more usefully, what you currently bin. Extraction bags, worn wheels, and bench matting are the three most commonly thrown away by working shops.
- Pans, filters, wheels, matting, and traps all accepted
- Streams kept separate so yields never mask each other
- Steel and blade fragments magnetically removed first
- Gold, silver, and platinum reported on separate lines
- Collection cycle set so pans never overflow onto the floor
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