Gold recycling drops in 2014

The recycling of gold declined dramatically to 1,122 metric ton (MT) in 2014, with a decrease of 26 percent of the total supply, a specialized economic report said on Thursday.
Despite this decline, statistics confirmed that there was an increase of four percent since 1980 until 2012, the report issued by the World Gold Council said.
The United States and the European countries produce the biggest amount of recycled gold, it noted.
The recycling processes in these countries jumped from 27 percent of the total supply in 2004 to 43 percent in 2011 due to the increasing demand for gold during the global economic crisis that swept markets in 2008, it pointed out.
The report examines the challenges and opportunities facing the gold recycling industry, which has two main components - high-value recycled gold and industrial recycled gold.
Between 1995 and 2013, recycled gold accounted for a third of total supply and an analysis of recycling data from 1982 to 2012 reveals that price fluctuations accounted for around 75 percent of the changes in recycling volumes and that economic shocks can boost recycling by up to 20 percent, it said.
It added that there were two ways of recycling of gold: The first is to separate the gold from other metals through dissolution and using high temperatures, adding this way usually produces low-purity gold.
The second way, the most complicated one, uses some chemical and physical interactions of gold in order to extract it through different electronic devices, it said, adding this process produces a recycled gold with a very high purity up to 99.99 percent according to the global criteria.