What happens to your gold after you sell it

Stage one: the last point at which your ring is still a ring

Before anything is melted, the parcel is sorted. Items are separated by metal and by carat, weighed individually, and assayed by X-ray fluorescence so the actual alloy is known rather than assumed from a stamp. Stones are removed and set aside for return. Non-gold components, steel posts, base-metal spring rings, watch movements, are identified and excluded from the weight. The point at which a piece enters that chain is the moment you accept a written offer, which is the last step in selling scrap gold.

This stage matters more than the chemistry that follows, because it is the last moment at which anything is reversible. A signed designer piece, a hallmarked Georgian item or a collectable coin is often worth more as an object than as metal, and it should be flagged here rather than quietly melted. If a piece is genuinely better sold at auction, an honest buyer says so and hands it back. That judgement cannot be made after the melt.

Stage two: why individual pieces are never refined individually

A single 4 gram chain cannot be refined on its own. Refining runs at industrial scale, with fixed set-up costs, chemical handling and assay overhead per batch. Economically and practically, scrap has to be aggregated: thousands of individual items from hundreds of sellers, sorted into carat bands, accumulated until there is enough of each to justify a run.

This is why the offer you receive is on metal content rather than on the object, and why condition genuinely makes no difference to a scrap figure. Once the decision to sell for metal is made, a snapped chain and a perfect one enter the same crucible.

Stage three: the melt and the sample

Aggregated scrap is melted together into a single homogeneous mass and cast as a bar. Homogeneity is the whole point: a mixed heap of jewellery cannot be sampled reliably, because a scraping from one chain says nothing about the rest of the lot, but a well-mixed molten batch is uniform throughout.

A sample is then taken from the melt, usually as a dip or a pin sample, and assayed. Fire assay, sometimes called cupellation, remains the reference method: the sample is fused with lead and fluxes, oxidised in a cupel so the base metals are absorbed, and the remaining precious-metal bead is weighed. It is slow, destructive and extremely accurate, which is why it is still the arbiter for settlement between a refiner and its suppliers.

Stage four: the chemistry, and why there are two routes

Two industrial processes do almost all of the world’s gold refining, and the choice between them is a trade-off between purity, speed and tied-up capital.

The Miller process blows chlorine gas through molten impure gold. The base metals react to form chlorides which either volatilise off or float as a low-density slag, while the gold does not react. It produces gold at around 99.5 per cent purity. Refiners favour it where the highest purity is not required, because it is fast and does not tie up a large inventory of gold in chemical form.

The Wohlwill process is electrolytic. A cast anode of roughly 95 per cent gold is suspended in an electrolyte of chloroauric acid, and a current is passed. Gold dissolves at the anode and plates onto the cathode in pure form, while impurities stay in solution or drop out as slime. It reaches 99.99 per cent and beyond, which is what investment-grade bars and 999.9 coin blanks require. The cost is time and capital: a substantial quantity of gold is permanently held in the electrolyte.

For smaller lots, wet chemistry is often used instead. Aqua regia, a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids, dissolves gold so it can be precipitated back out in pure form. Where a piece contains a lot of silver, an inquartation step is needed first, adjusting the alloy so the acid can reach the gold rather than being blocked by a silver chloride crust.

Stage five: what happens to everything that was not gold

The copper, silver, zinc and occasional platinum-group metals in jewellery alloy are not waste. Silver is recovered from the parting and electrolysis stages and refined in its own right. Copper and zinc are recovered where volumes justify it. Anode slimes from the Wohlwill process are a recognised source of platinum and palladium.

That recovery is part of why a refiner can pay for the gold content of a low-carat alloy at all. It is also why 9ct scrap, which is nearly two-thirds base metal by weight, is still commercially worth processing rather than discarding.

Stage six: back into the market

Refined gold re-enters the market in whatever form the buyer of it needs. Some is cast as large bars for vaulting and investment. Some is granulated into grain and sold to jewellery manufacturers, who alloy it back down to 9ct, 14ct or 18ct and cast it into new pieces. Some becomes coin blanks. A small share goes into electronics, where gold is used for its conductivity and resistance to corrosion.

In supply terms this is not a marginal flow. Recycled gold accounted for roughly 28 per cent of world gold supply in 2025, according to World Gold Council data: 1,404 tonnes out of a total of 5,002 tonnes. The environmental reading of that figure is more complicated than it first appears, and is set out in recycled gold vs mined gold.

What this means before you accept an offer

The practical implication of the whole chain is a single sentence: the melt is the point of no return, so every question worth asking should be asked before it. Is anything here worth more as an object than as metal? Do I want the stones back? Is there a piece I will regret? Once a written offer is accepted and the item joins a batch, none of those questions can be revisited.

That is why an itemised written offer matters. It gives you a line-by-line record of what you were about to part with, at the one moment when you can still change your mind about any line on it. Declining costs nothing and the parcel comes back tracked and signed for.