Does anyone legally incinerate?

This is the very reason why I no longer toll refine. When precious metals are involved, there are so many shady characters, including the major refineries, willing and waiting for the chance to steal. Because there are so many refiners, large refiners, who rip people off, it gives all refiners a bad name. That means, for the small refiner, that we have to work extra hard if we are toll refining, so that our customers know we are not stealing from them. But here is the other flip side of the problem, people always believe, with their entire being, that there is more gold in their material than their actually is.

I process material I purchase now, instead of toll refining for others. That way the transaction is done, both parties agree to the price, and there is no cheating anyone out of anything.

Scott

Originally Posted by PistoneScrapProcessing

Ha imagine that someone in the scrap industry trying to rip someone off!!!! The real problem with smelting is there is not a gold standard or certain way that everything is smelted and recovered. Everyone has a different process and way of doing it.

Its just like being a steel mill and trying to buy everything for as cheap as possible and trying to get maximum return out of your melt. Every mill has a different way of melting there steel, different buying program, different alloys produced, different mixing programs, different grades of material they buy, etc. In my opinions there are to many variables to smelting for it to get as close as you can to 100 percent recovery. There is going to be waste and material up the stack and into the baghouse. IMO.

Hmm when a laboratory can assay gold in parts per million from a ton of ore not much if any loss there if any at all.

Greenwood B.C. ran a large gold smelter early 1900's, there are huge slag piles everywhere and not a gram of gold to be found in the slag, someone must have been doing something right.

https://maps.google.ca/maps?q=greenw...en&sa=N&tab=wl

Actually I have leached cons with the HCl/Cl method.

Smelting is used in mining, sometimes it's the only way to separate metals from others efficiently. For example, if there is not enough silver to dore it and run as a silver proposition, then the silver has to either be upgraded, or removed. So it's often smelted with another metal it has more affinity for and thus is separated from the other amalgam. Then the process is repeated to separate out the other metals.

Also, depending upon the type of ore you are dealing with, the cons may be incinerated or roasted to convert chlorides to their metallic form, or to drive off sulfides, etc.

Precious metals often times are not in their metallic form when mined. There are actually very few that exist naturally in their metallic form, most are in their mineral form and must be somehow converted into their metallic form.

All of the processes that I currently use to recover and refine PMs, with the exception of one, have been used 100s of years before electronics were ever dreamed of. Point in case is Aqua Regia, it was first discovered at used in AD 800 by the Persian Alchemist Geber. And smelting goes all the way back to the copper age, even before the bronze age. So Aqua Regia, chemical refining with acids, is about 1200+ years old, and smelting, which started during the copper age, goes back over 5000 years. And there were obviously no computers back then.

Scott