Question About Scrap Silver

Not knowing for certain, I would think melting junk 90% silver would have much more profit.

And not sure if my math is right. I am thinking if they processed what would be a 1000oz of junk 90% silver there would be 100oz of copper left.

Even if my math is not right ... To me I would think separating silver and copper would have more profit than copper and zinc.

Unless it was based on the percentage the raw material was being bought at. If you were buying 95% copper cents between 1 to 2 cents each then extracting 3 cents of copper each, in volume you might have more profit.

My response is just my thoughts ..off the top of my head.
I am sure the experts would have a better idea on how the process works.

I agree a interesting question.

999 pure silver is, effectively, pure silver. Unless you're making nuclear-grade silver nitrate or something, 999 fine is easily good enough for anything you'd care to use or need to use. In science, there's no such thing as "zero", so there's so such thing as absolutely impurity-free silver. All you can do is make the level of impurities smaller and smaller and smaller - but of course, these extra stages of refinement needed to make extra-extra-pure metals are extra-extra-expensive. If you could find some, .999999 fine silver would probably cost about as much as platinum.


Silver is easier (and therefore cheaper) to refine in that the melting point is lower and (if chemical dissolution is the technique being used) because silver is "more noble", it falls out of solution easier than copper.

This guy has a tutorial on DIY-at-home silver refining. Let's try and break down the cost of his process:
- cost of buying "scrap" silver coins.
- cost of buying, and maintaining the gas in, a propane torch.
- cost of nitric acid - in his demo, he needed to use about 50 cents worth of acid to make $2 worth of silver. And since you can make bombs with nitric acid, there may be restrictions and controls on the ownership and use of nitric acid in your jurisdiction.
- cost of a piece of sacrificial copper.
- cost of disposing of the corrosive, toxic copper-laced jar of chemical waste. You could pour it down the sink, but that's probably against environmental regulations in your jurisdiction and you're also likely to corrode your plumbing if you're not careful. Extracting the copper back out of this solution again is not economically viable at these scales.
- cost of assaying the final product, since he really doesn't (and cannot) have any idea exactly how efficient the technique is until and unless the final product is tested.

Obviously, economies of scale are at play: the bigger your "batch", the more bulk discount you can get on your nitric acid, copper and other consumables; at large enough scales, things like re-distilling and recycling the nitric acid become feasible. Also notice that, to create a small piece of silver this way, a rather large piece of copper needs to be destroyed.

Increased costs when attempting to do much the same thing to copper include:
- finding another way to melt the refined copper, since a propane torch isn't going to get hot enough.
- copper does not simply "fall out" of solution like silver does; you need to force it to do so with electricity.

Increased costs, combined with a very much lower value end product, mean that these kinds of techniques are simply not economically viable on the same scale. You'd need copper to be worth more than silver for that to work for you.

As a teen in the late 70's I remember the Hunt Bros wanted as close to pure silver as possible, so we threw the 40% back. I was roll hunting then. Though I consider 40% silver halves 'dirty' - I've collected/sold close to 1,000 of those coins and have some in my collection.