Can I recycle my gold jewellery?
Great news, YES you can!!
The beauty of gold is that it can be melted down and re-shaped and made into a new piece of jewellery, and this can be done over and over again.
If you’ve got a piece of jewellery that you don’t wear, you can make it wearable again by getting it recycled into something else. I will use the metal from your existing piece to create something completely new.
Your existing jewellery can become anything, a ring doesn’t have to be remade into a ring. It can become earrings, a bracelet, a necklace, a pendant, cufflinks, a brooch, or even a keyring. Anything.
What about the gemstones?
Before melting down any metal, all gemstones would be removed. Any gemstones that are in tact are completely reusable in the next piece! You can use any type of stone!
How do I know if the jewellery that I have is gold?
Gold can come in a few different colours and MANY varying shades of these colours.
Pure gold – Pure gold is yellow 24 carat gold. 24 carat gold is soft and therefore not very suitable for making jewellery. Pure gold is mixed with other alloys (copper and fine silver) to create other carats of gold. Each carat has a fineness stamp if the piece is hallmarked.
Before I continue, you may be thinking… :
Karat vs Carat?
Karat refers to the fineness of metal and Carat is a unit of weight that we use to talk about precious stones. (one carat equals 200 milligrams) In the UK and Australia, Carat tends to be used for both. So the answer is, both karat and carat are in reference to the purity of gold and Carat is the weight of precious stones.
So what does the ‘carat’ number actually mean?
For example:
24 carat gold = 99.9% gold (999 stamp)
22 carat gold = 92% gold + 8% alloys (916 stamp)
18 carat gold = 75% gold + 25% alloys (750 stamp)
14 carat gold = 59% gold + 41% alloys (585 stamp)
9 carat gold = 38% gold + 62% alloys (375 stamp)
The stamp on a piece of jewellery can sometimes be tiny and difficult to read with the naked eye, but if your yellow jewellery has a stamp inside, it’s likely that it is gold and it’s therefore likely that I can melt it down to make something new out of it, if you wish of course! You can download the Assay Office’s Dealer’s notice below which is a guide to what exactly every number and symbol stands for in your jewellery.
What about coloured golds?
When gold is mixed or alloyed with other metals it can can become lots of other colours other than yellow! All the different colours of gold are available in the carats above:
White Gold: Available from 20 carat and lower as the pure gold is yellow and needs mixing with other metals to turn white. White gold is a beautiful greyish colour, particularly when compared to silver, which is a very white colour. White gold jewellery has a tendency to be rhodium plated, which would give it a whiter than white finish. Alloys for white gold include silver, zinc and palladium.
Rose Gold: Available from 20 carat and lower. Alloys are copper and fine silver, and in red gold, the proportion of copper is higher, which is where the red colour comes from.
Green Gold: WHAT?! GREEN GOLD?! Yes, green gold, but despite the name, green gold doesn’t actually look very green. It’s very close to yellow gold. Green gold is made up of pure gold + fine silver.
The yellow gold is the most obvious one to identify. If you’ve got anything in your jewellery box that is yellow, separate all that out. Now, if any of that jewellery was cheap, chances are it’s plated or brass. Brass is a beautiful metal when it is polished and it can look just like gold but it oxidises and tarnishes very quickly and can turn your finger green!
What other types of gold are there?
If you’ve got something and it’s golden coloured but not actual GOLD, it can be a few different things. There’s quite a bit of terminology, I’ve compiled a non-exhaustive list of what you might find.
Gold Vermeil – Vermeil is a type of plating – it’s a thick plating of a minimum of 3 microns. In order to be vermeil, the base of the piece must be Silver.
Gold Plating – This is a thin layer of gold which coats the base metal the jewellery is made from.
Gold Filled – This is a base metal covered in a layer of gold. I don’t have much knowledge about this, except for there are a lot of people online claiming that things are gold, when they are gold filled.
Brass – Looks like gold, tarnishes very quickly.
I can’t talk about jewellery and not mention probably the most popular of the metal out there… SILVER!
Can you recycle Silver?
Yes you can! You can have silver melted down and made into something new.
Silver is a beautiful material. It has a beautiful white shine and is robust and very ideal for jewellery, and most wonderfully, it’s affordable! Silver can be fine silver (999 Stamped) which is silver in its pure form, but like gold, when it’s pure, it’s too soft and needs to be mixed with a little something something to harden up. Sterling Silver is 92.5% fine silver + 7.5% usually copper. Silver jewellery is normally stamped with 925.
Silver Tarnishes. Almost all silver does. It’s the copper within it that means that when it reacts with sulphur gases in the air and oxidizes over a period of time. This is easily polished out and doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with your silver.
If you’re thinking about getting a piece made, take some photos of your jewellery or get it all together and let’s have a call. It’s not easy to identify everything immediately! I can also do testing in my workshop to check if a metal is silver or gold, and approximately what carat it is. Cool eh?