Can Jewelry be Recycled?
Can Jewelry be Recycled?
Jewelry can definitely be recycled. Although it’s not as easy to recycle as regular household items such as newspapers and other paper material. That you just collect the paper from your home and put it in a bin for the recycling truck to pick up in the morning. Recycling your jewelry is more complicated. This is because there are more considerations such as sentimental and financial value, how it’s recycled, where it’s recycled etc.
Nonetheless, there are plenty of good reasons to recycle your jewelry rather than to just discard it. Today’s blog takes a look at recycling, re-purposing, and reusing jewelry.
Recycling Precious Metals
Precious metals such as gold, silver, and platinum have a high market value and typically hold that value. In fact, precious metals tend to have a more stable market value than precious stones. To recycle jewelry, the metals can be melted down and made into a new piece of jewelry, or other items. If the jewelry is made from gold or silver, it’s even possible to have it melted down at the jeweler’s bench because gold and silver don’t have high melting temperatures. Although this does work best for simple, unadorned jewelry like wedding bands.
Precious metals such as platinum and palladium, on the other hand, have very high melting temperatures. So they require special melting and recasting equipment, making it impractical to do at the jeweler’s bench. However, there are other ways to recycle platinum jewelry such as reusing parts of the existing piece of jewelry in the new design. One popular recycling choice for older jewelry made with platinum is to reuse the shank from the old piece in the new piece.
It should be noted, that because of the time and the process required to recycle your “old gold” (or other precious metal), doing so doesn’t usually work out to be any less expensive than just using “new gold” for a jewelry piece. Most people will recycle the precious metals in an old piece of jewelry purely sentimental reasons, not for economic reasons. Reusing precious stones, however, is another story…
Recycling Jewelry with Gemstones
Extracting stones from an old design to use in a new design is a fairly uncomplicated process and often quite economical. It’s always a good idea to have your jewelry appraised before you recycle it. This way you’ll find out the value of the stones, which can better inform your decision about what to do with your piece. For many people, reusing the gemstones from an heirloom piece or a piece that has sentimental value has great appeal. It allows them to have a custom-made piece more suited to their tastes while also keeping elements of the jewelry piece with sentimental value close to heart.
Creating New Jewelry from Old – Reusing Your Old Jewelry
When you design a new piece of jewelry, you can work with the designer to create a piece that is based on your own tastes. CAD jewelry design is especially suited to this process because it allows for greater detail, complexity and options. For example, the piece can be designed to fit the gemstone specifications of your old piece exactly. CAD also makes it much easier to revise a design until you achieve the desired outcome. Our success story for Heather Jewelry provides a more in-depth look at how CAD can be used to create new from old.
Another option is to combine design elements from other jewelry models with design elements from your old piece. Many people first find CAD models that they like and then request modifications to the design that meet their vision of their desired jewelry.
Below are just a few examples of the sketch-to-finish design process:
