Gold is a highly valuable material that is used by many people as a way to store value and make investments. Along with gold coins, gold bullion, and gold jewellery, there is also a strong scrap gold industry all over the world. Because gold is such a valuable commodity, it is never thrown away and rarely forgotten about. The scrap gold industry is involved with making a valuation of gold material in a number of products, so that it can be converted through melting it down and reformed into other products.

There are a number of gold products that are regularly melted down and transformed into other things, including jewellery, electronics, and a number of specific industries. The global scrap gold industry is primarily involved with providing valuations of this gold before it is melted down and purchasing products before sending them on to be melted. Gold is a highly valued material, and people generally realise that it can be sold for money. Because of this, old gold items like jewellery are regularly sold to scrap gold dealers, who then make a profit by selling them on to different buyers and industries.

The act of gold extraction during the mining process is very expensive, with as little as 0.5 mg/kg being extracted from the mining process. This is only about 0.5 parts per million, which goes to show why it is such an expensive commodity. This is another reason why the scrap gold industry exists, because it is a much more economical way to get access to the material. In fact, most of the gold used in manufactured goods, jewellery, and art is recovered and recycled through the scrap gold sector, with an estimated 85 per cent of all gold mined still available in easily recoverable stocks.