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Recycling Gold for a Low-Carbon Future

Published Tuesday 30th November 2021

After this year’s UN Climate Conference, COP26, hosted in Glasgow, industries such as the gold market are under pressure to embrace greater sustainability. Selling more scrap gold could be just the ticket to helping make gold much greener. That’s because a large chunk of the world’s gold supply is recycled.

Benefits of recycling gold

You only need to look at costs to assess why recycling is preferable to sourcing gold through mining. The gold price is high, reflecting how ideal it is for selling any gold you have. Gold mining, which ultimately sources most of the world’s gold, also comes at a high price, but to the planet at large. For every troy ounce the world produces, 0.8 tonnes of CO2e are emitted. If we are to put all of our eggs into the gold mining basket, we only add to the scale of our climate challenge.

Recycling gold, on the other hand, is significantly more convenient to do, helps you make some money and also saves tonnes of carbon from being emitted through mining. It all starts with simply selling gold you already have, to Scrap Gold UK. Gold is seen as having great intrinsic value, hardly oxidising, and it can be melted down and reshaped into new items over and over again without losing that shine.

The World Gold Council estimated that 28 per cent of the world’s gold was sourced through recycling alone in 2020. It’s a tried and tested practice which has been carried out for generations. At times when supplies of gold were scarce, mines ran dry and the gold rush was seemingly over, melting down and recycling existing gold was the next best thing. In a modern context, it is significantly less costly to the planet, and keeps supply chains in a more circular resource loop. Why dig for more gold, when we’ve got plenty to recycle up on the surface?

The golden circle

Recycling gold is just one aspect of what is touted as a circular economy: a world in which resources can be consumed, recycled and reused before the process is repeated ad infinitum. By setting our sights away from plundering the planet for more resources, recycling is a natural approach which helps maintain a circular economy within the gold market. By selling scrap gold with Scrap Gold UK, for example, you are helping reduce demand for fresh gold to be mined, by providing more of it ready to be recycled.

Not only do mines produce carbon through their activities, but also often release toxic waste products into the environment. Lower demand for mined gold means less of these nasty side effects. It’s a rebalancing act, and you could be pivotal in making it happen sooner rather than later.

Whether you possess rose gold or white gold, dental gold or jewellery, this precious metal can come in all shapes and sizes. Scrap Gold UK are gold specialists who have been helping facilitate sales of gold for a number of years now. If gold is to maintain its shine, it should also embrace the greener way of doing things. To learn more about selling gold, get in touch with us today.

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