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26 results for “Minamata Convention”
Mining · 22 May 2026
The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem
…ring visible gold within hours. It requires almost no equipment or capital. · What is the Minamata Convention? A global treaty addressing mercury, which specifically requires signatory states with significant ASGM to produce national action plans to reduce and where feasible elim…
Amara Okonjo · 15 min read
Craft · 22 July 2026
Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold
…enforcement funding falls, the mark degrades from a verified statement into a decorative convention. · That erosion is gradual and largely invisible to buyers, which is precisely the danger. A system like this works because it is boringly reliable; it stops working the moment th…
Yusuf Demir · 15 min read
Mining · 5 August 2026
Grade, Cut-off and the Arithmetic of an Open Pit
…de 3:1 Typical strip ratio: waste tonnes moved per tonne of ore 88–94% Recovery range for conventional carbon-in-leach circuits 1–2 yrs Time from ore in the pit to metal at the refinery, including stockpiles · The energy-grade trade-off · The fundamental constraint on modern mini…
Amara Okonjo · 20 min read
Science · 8 August 2026
The Metal That Went Medical
…cturing a usable nanogold reagent means controlling a size distribution as tightly as any conventional pharmaceutical ingredient, which is why a small number of specialist suppliers dominate the field. · Why is colloidal gold red instead of gold-coloured? Because at nanometre sca…
Amara Okonjo · 19 min read
Industry · 4 August 2026
The Gold Inside Your Phone
…ticles, which can be printed or sprayed onto flexible substrates that would be damaged by conventional plating or soldering processes. The gold quantities involved are minute, often a few micrograms per printed feature, but the application category is expanding quickly as flexibl…
Tomas Herrera · 18 min read
Markets · 11 September 2026
The Last Audit: What We Actually Know About the World's Official Gold
…bars, in foreign custodians whose word substitutes for an owner's eyes, and in reporting conventions that allow a tonne out on loan to count the same as a tonne on the shelf. · To understand the audit gap you first have to understand what a reported reserve figure actually is, b…
Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read
Markets · 2 August 2026
Who Actually Sets the Gold Price
…in a specific place, in a specific form of the metal, under a specific set of settlement conventions — and if you change any one of those variables the number changes with it. · The number almost always means this: an ounce of gold, of Good Delivery quality, held unallocated in…
Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read
Markets · 17 August 2026
Paper Gold: What You Own When You Do Not Own Bars
…st be immediate and in equal measure to avoid riba, which historically excluded gold from conventional deferred-settlement trading for observant investors. The AAOIFI Shariah Standard on Gold, published in 2016, resolved this for the modern market by defining conditions under whi…
Ingrid Sørensen · 23 min read
Markets · 20 June 2026
Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation
…t has not kept pace with metallurgical standards. Bars cast decades ago under older assay conventions sometimes fall outside current minimum fineness or dimensional tolerances, or their documentation trail has gaps that a modern auditor will not accept. Rather than argue the poin…
Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read
Markets · 8 August 2026
Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices
…eclared origin cannot be verified to a regulator's satisfaction. · This risk sits outside conventional specie insurance, which covers physical loss and damage but routinely excludes government action, confiscation and sanctions-driven freezes. Large holders manage it the way they…
Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read
Craft · 5 June 2026
The Alchemy of Craft: What Goldsmiths Know That Machines Don't
…dsmiths per capita anywhere, serving both a domestic culture in which gold jewellery is a conventional store of value and gift, and international wholesale buyers. Smaller specialist pockets persist elsewhere for particular reasons: Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter as a legacy of B…
Yusuf Demir · 16 min read
Science · 9 August 2026
The Metallurgy of Karat
…ment as the karat figure, expressed as parts per thousand. It is the modern international convention and it is unambiguous in a way that '18k' printed on an unhallmarked import is not. In jurisdictions with a compulsory hallmarking regime, that number has been verified by an inde…
Tomas Herrera · 17 min read
Industry · 6 August 2026
The Scrap Trade
…e shredded, sorted and often pre-treated to concentrate the metal-bearing fraction before conventional refining becomes economic. Formal e-waste recycling operates under increasingly strict environmental permitting in developed markets, reflecting the toxic residues in circuit bo…
Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read
Craft · 3 August 2026
The Wedding-Season Bid: How Jewellery Demand Sets the Floor
…ntial bar-and-coin component absent from India's overwhelmingly ornamental market. Purity convention — 24-karat is the default retail expectation in China; 22-karat dominates Indian retail, with 24-karat reserved mostly for coins and investment bars. Policy lever — India manages…
Yusuf Demir · 15 min read
Industry · 28 July 2026
Urban Mining: The Richest Gold Ore on Earth Is in Your Old Phone
…still mostly copper by mass, goes to a smelter where it functions as feedstock alongside conventional copper concentrate. The precious metals collect preferentially into the copper matte during smelting, are separated at the anode stage of copper electrorefining as a sludge, and…
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
Science · 10 August 2026
Where Gold Actually Comes From
…added to since, the modern gold market is best understood as a closed loop rather than a conventional extractive industry. Mining does not create new supply in any absolute sense; it transfers gold from a form the market cannot use — trace concentrations locked in ordinary rock…
Tomas Herrera · 17 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…
Tomas Herrera · 16 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 · 16 min read
Mining · 19 August 2026
Nine Grams a Tonne
What does it actually cost to pull an ounce of gold out of the ground? The honest answer runs through grade decline, energy and water bills, permitting delays and the closure liabilities nobody prices…
Amara Okonjo · 18 min read
Industry · 2 July 2026
Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery
A doré bar arrives at 85 per cent purity and leaves at 99.99. Between those two numbers sit chlorine gas, aqua regia, an electrolytic cell and a chain of custody that is now as valuable as the metal i…
Tomas Herrera · 19 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
Markets · 8 September 2026
The Real-Rate Trade: Why Gold Moves When Bond Yields Do
For two decades the gold price could be read off an inflation-linked bond screen. Then, somewhere after 2022, the relationship stopped behaving — and the argument about why has become the most consequ…
Ingrid Sørensen · 25 min read
Industry · 20 August 2026
The Refiner's Ledger
Somewhere between a mine's doré bar and a Good Delivery brick sits a chain of chlorination furnaces, electrolytic cells, assay labs and accreditation committees that decides which gold the world's mar…
Tomas Herrera · 17 min read
Markets · 18 August 2026
The Vault Beneath the City
Beneath the Bank of England and beneath lower Manhattan sit two of the largest concentrations of monetary gold on earth, moved between anonymous compartments by a handful of porters who never touch th…
Ingrid Sørensen · 22 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 · 14 min read
