How to prepare scrap gold for melting

A refinery can melt almost anything that contains gold. How much value comes back, and how quickly, depends a good deal on how the material was prepared before it left the workshop. This is the checklist we would give a jeweller sending us their first lot.

Sort by karat

Mixed-karat scrap melts into a single bar whose fineness is the weighted average of everything that went in. That is fine if you only want the total gold content, but it means an 18k bracelet and a 9k chain end up valued at the same blended figure. If you can separate scrap by karat before sending it, each lot is melted, sampled and assayed on its own, and the result for each is exactly what that material was worth.

Keep the three material types apart

Scrap jewellery, casting returns and bench sweeps behave very differently in the furnace:

• Scrap jewellery is mostly metal, melts cleanly and loses very little
• Casting returns — sprues, buttons and runners — are clean alloy of a known karat and usually give the most predictable result
• Bench sweeps are dust, polishing compound, abrasive and filings, with a low and variable gold content

Bag them separately. If sweeps are mixed into a jewellery lot, the non-metal fraction burns off and drags the melted weight down, and the assay on the blended bar tells you less than two separate assays would.

Remove what isn’t gold

Steel springs in clasps, base-metal findings, solder-filled hollow pieces and plated items all end up in the crucible if they go in the bag. They don’t add gold, they do add weight on intake, and some of them contaminate the alloy in ways that make the melt harder to sample cleanly. A few minutes with a magnet and a loupe before packing saves loss on the other side.

Weigh and label

Weigh each lot on your own scale before it leaves and write the weight, the karat and your company name on the bag. When the material is weighed again on intake at the refinery, the two figures should agree within the tolerance of the scales. If they don’t, both sides know before anything is melted.

What to expect back

At Meridas, every lot is weighed on intake, melted in an induction furnace, and poured into a homogeneous bar. A sample is drawn from that bar and assayed, with the result issued within 24 hours. You receive the intake weight, the melted weight, the assay result, and the metal itself — as a bar, or forwarded to refining if you asked for bar-grade fineness. Settlement is by bank transfer in AED or in metal, immediately after the assay result.

If you are sending metal for the first time, the account-opening page lists the documents we need before the first lot arrives, and our Dubai office handles collection and logistics.