Spotlight on North American Gold & Silver Refining
Appendix - Gold and Silver Recycling Definitions
| Metals Focus Definition * | LBMA Definition |
|---|---|
| Includes old jewellery and silverware that are sold back into the supply chain, either by consumers or retailers. | There is no distinction between jewellery and silverware that is sold back by consumers, or exchanged for a new piece: both streams are included in the COO “unprocessed” or “melted” recycling datasets. |
| Includes coins that have been fabricated, but never sold, that are subsequently melted down. | Gold and silver recovered from industrial products, in the “industrial by-products” segment. |
| Excludes: old jewellery that is exchanged for a new product, where the consumer pays the labour charge (this is common across Asia). | The LBMA COO data includes gold and silver process scrap collected from manufacturers; forms part of “unprocessed” recycling. |
| Excludes: “production” or “process” recycling, that is collected from jewellery, investment, industrial and dental manufacturers. | Includes all coins and bars, irrespective if they have been sold back by investors, returned unsold by the trade or delivered from a vault. As such, this includes the reprocessing of GDL bars (e.g. into smaller bar sizes) which forms part of the COO recycling dataset, either in “unprocessed” or “legacy stocks”. |
| Excludes: the selling back of small investment bars and coins into the supply chain - these are categorised as disinvestment, not recycling. | Note: the COO statistics for recycling can include gold and/or silver that is recovered from base metals mining concentrates (instead Metals Focus report this as a component of mine production). |
| Excludes: the melting down of GDL bars, of both gold and silver, for the purposes of e.g. small bar production. | |
| * Where possible the recycled gold and silver is counted in the region where it is generated, rather than where it is refined. |