20%
losses due to impurities, K?
The only employee job I ever held was at a company in Switzerland which had it's own foundry. They even had the license to cast the bars for Credit Suisse and 12Kg bars for the National Bank. Believe me, there is no such thing as 20% losses! 1% losses would raise red flags all over the place in that business. They did all recycling for the region, dental tech. and "industrial" jewelry like wedding rings and chains. All from the foundry to rolling gold flat to cutting, stamping and machining.
The impurities in the foundry float up, black spots. It gets skimmed off and then re-melted to get all the gold off the impurities. Even at "only" 18 bucks a gram back then... they dealt with kilo loads.., they could never afford to "loose" double digit percentages up in what, smokes?
Same with the jewelry dept. Workers had to leave their working shoes IN the shop, they would get scraped every month. Even so, they had rolling brush entry pads to brush off any dust of small gold particles... in a year they'd recollect over 100gr there! In a company with 220 employees.
If you believe the boys at Antwerp are in the business of "loosing" 20% gold, I have some other stories to amuse you with.
Scrap Gold is usually paid 20% off the value of it real gold content. There are COSTS involved with melting... most of all if you seek to do it commercially bulk. And then, there is PROFIT. COMMERCIAL gold buyers everywhere, do not hoard their gold, but just have it melted and sell it for it's real value bulk, where they buy it up piece by piece and make a LIVING doing so.
If you buy a 750/18Ct piece of gold and bring it to a jeweler who can melt it down... the cost is minimal, the loss due to evaporation is in the per-mil range and the question of impurities can be cleared out 99.% by cleaning the exterior of the original piece before melting it to make the new one.
When a jeweler works on a creation, he will need more metal to work with than the piece will finally weight. That extra gold does not magically "evaporate", it may become small particles and even file dust. But a jeweler, aware of the cost of the material he works on, while go to great lengths to recuperate in dust collectors the most of it.
When a jeweler tries to tell me, that 5 out of 25gr of Gold will "magically" go lost, he's either totally inept and would be drowning in gold dust without knowing (highly unlikely) or just a scam "artist"... well, "artist"... not even an artist... just one with a dummy schmuus he thinks he can pitch on dumb Gringos.
Btw. MOST jewelry in Switzerland is 18Ct. While most in Germany will only be 14Ct or less. In the US, FINE jewelry is 18Ct too and all the "bling" stuff is 14Ct or 8Ct. Spain uses 18Ct. I remember buying all sorts of 18Ct gold articles in 18Ct in Antwerp in the late '80's.
... J-D.
J-D,
As I am from Antwerp, I had several friends in the diamond and jewelry business. 3 of them were world famous gold smiths. They always told me that if you brought in old gold to be recuperated, you would lose about 20% with melting it down again (impurities, etc...). I can guarantee they were not trying to screw me, as I only bought new gold from them.
They also only worked with 18ct gold. I am surprised this would be available here, as Belgium is one of the rare countries to work with such high quality. Most countries use 14ct, or sometimes even 9ct.
Good luck
BelgianK