Originally Posted by
PartTimeScrapper
What are you paying for silver plated stuff?
Unfortunately silver plated items are only really worth the underlying metal to someone like myself, but let me explain why so you understand.
Silver currently is at .55 cents per gram. One gram of silver will plate many, many, many items. The electrolysis required to separate the silver from the base metal would cost more, than the actual silver recovered. Now that's not to say it has no value at all, because it does if you have large quantities. For example, once you have accumulated a large quantity of silver plated over copper, you can send it to a copper refiner. What they do is melt everything into a homogenous alloy, then process it in a copper electrolytic cell which precludes the need for operating the cell as a de-plating cell. The reason this is cost effective is because once you have accumulated large amounts of copper, you start accumulating small amounts of the impurities involved in copper, such as gold.
But we are talking about thousands of lbs.
I almost never process silver plate, although I have done so to familiarize myself with the process. What I usually do is re-plate it and sell it on ebay, or if I have something that is gold plated, I strip the gold plating and re-plate in silver and sell on ebay, or craigslist, etc. Silver and copper for that matter, have incredible antibacterial/microbial properties, that's why being born with a silver spoon in your mouth gives you such a great start in life. Or why back when people didn't have refrigerators, they put a silver coin in their milk.
Scott
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