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7 results for “ore grade decline” in Industry
Industry · 4 August 2026
The Gold Inside Your Phone
…rth a few dollars at prevailing prices. · Gold is specified where a connection must not degrade: it does not form an insulating oxide, so contact resistance stays stable for decades. · Substitution is real and mostly already happened — copper bonding wire displaced gold across hi…
Tomas Herrera · 15 min read
Industry · 28 July 2026
Urban Mining: The Richest Gold Ore on Earth Is in Your Old Phone
A tonne of good underground ore holds a few grams of gold. A tonne of discarded circuit boards can hold two hundred. So why is most of it still going into landfill? · Concentration, not tonnage, is what makes an ore ec…
Tomas Herrera · 21 min read
Industry · 6 August 2026
The Scrap Trade
Roughly a quarter of the world's annual gold supply has been gold before. It arrives as broken chains, single earrings and dental crowns, and it moves through a chain of intermediaries that most sellers never see past the first counter. · Recycled metal typic…
Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read
Industry · 7 August 2026
After the Cyanide
…he risk lies in handling and storage, not in the chemistry being exotic. · Free cyanide degrades in sunlit water over weeks; the durable hazards at a closed mine are usually metals and acidity, not the reagent itself. · Acid mine drainage generates when sulphide minerals meet air…
Tomas Herrera · 17 min read
Industry · 20 August 2026
The Refiner's Ledger
…é, the raw semi-refined alloy poured at a mine site, must be re-refined and re-assayed before it can circulate as investment or jewellery-grade gold. · A small cluster of Swiss refineries has historically processed a majority of the world's mined gold, though Emirati and Asian re…
Tomas Herrera · 20 min read
Industry · 7 August 2026
How Fake Gold Is Detected
…r the interior. · Ultrasonic velocity testing is the standard front-line defence against core-filled bars, because sound travels through tungsten far faster than through gold. · For coins, precise dimensional gauging is unusually powerful: the mint's tolerances are tighter than a…
Tomas Herrera · 15 min read
Industry · 2 July 2026
Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery
…nes a bar's marketability as much as its fineness. · Recycled scrap is a large and often more profitable feedstock than mined doré, but it demands heavier sorting and compliance work before it ever reaches the furnace. · The metallurgy has barely changed since the 1870s; what has…
Tomas Herrera · 12 min read
