Welcome to Boardsort™ - Learn - Sell - Profit -

So we have a items with gold or silver plating, that gets dumped in the steel melting pot at the mill furnace. Is this thrown out in the slag, or is it a recoverable commodity ?

TLDR:
Depends on the company. “Slag” is rarely “thrown out”.
Generally is pulled, cooled, and readded to future melts. Much of what is called slag is often a mixed carbon-heavy waste. Useful in manufacturing steels.

today most large companies are dealing with a rather pure product pre melt. Shredding has become the norm and small pieces are easily to economically sort. Large sorting Companies then sell presorted materials based on the highest contaminate. Steel plus wood or steel plus organics in construction shred.
Aluminium plus plastics or aluminium plus tin.
Copper plus nickel or copper plus silver.
Etc



Answer: Very little of metal recycling waste is ever “trashed”. In actuality your PM will probably end up in some steel product somewhere.

If you were to scan a modern car door with a high end RS scanner you’ll find all sorts of trace metals beyond the basics of nickel, tin, and iron.

A factory melting cars isn’t going to worry about a single silver spoon in the mix. Or even a trunk full. (Well, they’d probably remove that, lol).

Copper recycling is usually set up to pull gold, silver, nickel, and tin.
Steel will usually pull nickel and tin in the premelt sorting. Which happens to be two of the largest plated sources.

Tin and nickel can both be detected by radio spectrum scans automatically and at speed in the belt transport process. So it’s usually removed before it makes it to the feed source pile. As such things switches and contacts etc that are partially plated will often be pulled before it they get melted.
Same thing with some of the transition metals and rare earths. They create very unique responses and then a little robotic wedge will shove that tiny section off the belt for hand sorting. Or more commonly to be binned for a separate melt or resale to another company.

Slag is often bought and remelted by refineries looking for specific materials.
And in the very end the worst of the remaining slag can (in industrial countries) be crystallised, salted, compacted, and burnt as fuel. Much like coal or charcoal. The remaining soot can then be collected, compacted, and burnt again. Not the cleanest energy but since so much is filtered and reburnt it’s actually near carbon neutral. The days of dumping a thousand tons of cooled slag in a landfill are long past.

_________________
42 6F 61 72 64 73 6F 72 74 2E 63 6F 6D