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Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

…, or 'five nines', for specialist electronics and scientific applications. · Why does the Miller process stop at about 99.5 per cent? Chlorination removes base metals and most silver efficiently, but the remaining platinum-group elements and residual silver will not separate as c…

Tomas Herrera · 12 min read

Industry · 6 August 2026

The Scrap Trade

…ld on to a refiner, melted, sampled and assayed properly, then refined — typically by the Miller chlorination process to remove base metals, followed by Wohlwill electrolysis for high purity. The output is cast into bars or grain and re-enters the market indistinguishable from an…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Science · 10 August 2026

Where Gold Actually Comes From

…ion — building nuclei heavier than iron consumes energy rather than releasing it. · The r-process, a rapid burst of neutron capture, is the accepted route, and neutron star mergers are the best-evidenced site for it. · Almost all of the gold present when Earth formed sank into th…

Tomas Herrera · 18 min read

Industry · 28 July 2026

Urban Mining: The Richest Gold Ore on Earth Is in Your Old Phone

…se strong acids, cyanide or high-temperature smelting, and the informal versions of these processes are responsible for severe heavy-metal and dioxin exposure in communities where they are practised. This article is reporting, not a procedure. · Does recycling reduce the need for…

Tomas Herrera · 13 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

After the Cyanide

Every ounce of mined gold leaves behind roughly a tonne of processed rock and the water that carried it. What happens to that material after the last shift is the part of the industry with the longest timeline and the least coverage. · Cyanide is us…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Privacy Policy

…he controller of the personal data described here. That means we decide why and how it is processed. Where we use service providers — for hosting, for content delivery, or for aggregate audience measurement — those providers act as processors on our written instructions and may n…

Mining · 5 August 2026

Grade, Cut-off and the Arithmetic of an Open Pit

…grade? The lowest grade at which a tonne of rock generates more revenue than it costs to process. Rock above it is ore and goes to the mill; rock below it is waste and goes to the dump. Because the calculation depends on the gold price, energy costs and recovery rate, the bounda…

Amara Okonjo · 16 min read

Mining · 22 May 2026

The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem

…a heavy concentrate so that gold can be melted out directly. It removes mercury from the process entirely and uses a material available in any hardware market. · It also demands a higher-grade concentrate than panning typically produces, which means it must be paired with improv…

Amara Okonjo · 12 min read

Markets · 20 June 2026

Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation

…. · Central banks have nonetheless been doing exactly this. Over the past decade a steady procession of reserve managers has repatriated metal that had sat abroad, in some cases since the 1950s. The Bundesbank's multi-year programme to bring holdings back from Paris and New York…

Ingrid Sørensen · 13 min read

Craft · 22 July 2026

Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold

…each element emits, infer composition in seconds without damaging the piece. For a dealer processing a queue of walk-in sellers, it is transformative. · Its limitation is physical and unavoidable: XRF reads a shallow surface layer. A gold-plated base-metal item, a gold-filled ite…

Yusuf Demir · 12 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

The Alchemy of Craft: What Goldsmiths Know That Machines Don't

…recovery rates are a line item that decides whether a workshop is profitable. · What the process cannot do is originate. Casting reproduces a master. Someone must still make the master, and at the top of the trade that person is at a bench with a graver, a torch and a lamp, doin…

Yusuf Demir · 11 min read

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

…umber of very large facilities. Where that infrastructure is absent, the same material is processed with open acid baths and burning, which recovers a fraction of the metal and poisons the people doing it. · Industrial gold, then, is a small market that behaves nothing like the r…

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

…erstanding by the older fixing arrangement, in which a small group of banks conducted the process by telephone. That system was replaced after regulatory scrutiny with an electronic, auditable, wider-participation auction. The reform is real, and the criticism that produced it wa…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

Counterfeiting gold is not about making something that looks right. It is about defeating a specific test, and the industry's defences are an escalating conversation between forgers and instruments. ·…

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

Markets · 8 August 2026

Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices

Between the vault and the buyer sits an industry of armoured vehicles, sealed cargo, bonded warehouses and insurance clauses. It rarely makes news, and it is the reason a spot price in London can dive…

Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read

History · 14 July 2026

The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money

For roughly five thousand years, humanity kept returning to the same element to settle its debts. The story is less about greed than about the unusually boring chemistry of atomic number 79. · Gold's…

Marguerite Adler · 14 min read

History · 9 August 2026

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

A field of gold torcs and coins is a spectacular find and a treacherous document. The people who buried it were not writing to us, and the reasons they had for putting it in the ground are exactly wha…

Marguerite Adler · 16 min read

Science · 8 August 2026

The Metal That Went Medical

Divide gold finely enough and it stops being gold-coloured, stops being inert in the way you expect, and starts doing work in places no bullion bar could reach — including the test strip that told you…

Amara Okonjo · 15 min read

Science · 9 August 2026

The Metallurgy of Karat

Pure gold is too soft to hold a stone, too soft to hold an edge, and the wrong colour for half the world's taste. Almost everything you own that is gold is a designed alloy — and the design is where t…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Craft · 3 August 2026

The Wedding-Season Bid: How Jewellery Demand Sets the Floor

Half the world's gold is worn, not stored. In India and China that distinction barely exists — and the buying behaviour it produces is the most reliably contrarian force in the entire market. · Jewell…

Yusuf Demir · 16 min read

Markets · 6 August 2026

Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again

For three decades official institutions were net sellers of bullion, and the policy consensus treated the metal as a museum piece. Then, quietly, the world's reserve managers reversed. The reasons are…

Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Cookie Policy

…rns the site to its default state of asking. Withdrawal does not affect the lawfulness of processing carried out before you withdrew, but it stops all optional storage from that moment. · If you use several devices or browsers, the choice is stored per device. That is a limitatio…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Financial Disclaimer

…wrong, promptly and visibly, under the procedure set out in our Editorial Standards. That process reduces error; it does not eliminate it, and no publication that claims otherwise is being straight with you. · Data drawn from third parties — exchange settlements, refinery statist…