Many people go their whole lives without thinking about dental scrap refining. But if you’re a dental professional or patient who’s had a metal implant put in, you may wonder what happens to the material once it’s eventually extracted and no longer useful. Common restorations like crowns and bridges often contain precious metals like gold, silver, platinum and palladium. Not only are precious metals great for long-term use in dental repairs, but they can be worth a pretty penny.
What is Dental Scrap?
Precious metal dental scrap refers to a variety of materials: crowns and bridges, PFMs, inlays/onlays and more. If a patient, for example, has a gold crown removed to be replaced, they can opt to keep the extracted crown and sell it to a refinery like Garfield.
Oftentimes patients don’t ask for their extracted materials back, so dentists will hold onto the scrap and make sure that it gets recycled. (After all, nobody wants to throw precious metals in the trash).
When a dentist collects a handful of scrap pieces, they can ship it to a refinery like Garfield to ensure that the contents are recycled and repurposed. Plus, they’ll get paid for the metals.
What is Refining?
Precious metals refining is essentially a form of recycling. Precious metals like gold, silver, platinum and palladium can be endlessly recycled and repurposed without ever losing quality – which is great, because the earth has a limited supply of them. Finding new uses for unwanted precious metals is both eco-friendly and potentially lucrative.
The refining process involves melting scrap material, extracting impurities, and pouring the purified metals into molds to form bars. These bars are then re-entered into the metals market and used to make things like jewelry, bullion, electronic components, silverware, and of course, more dental implants.
Why Dentists Use Gold
Gold is the oldest tooth restoration material in dentistry. Tooth repairs using gold date back to the ancient Etruscans as early as the 7th century BCE.
With the advent of modern materials that offer a more natural look – such as porcelain and zirconium – gold has taken a back seat in recent years. But it’s very unlikely that dental gold will ever be completely replaced by newer options, because gold has a lot to offer. Dentists still love gold because it boasts unmatched durability, corrosion resistance, biocompatibility, precise shapes and sizes for a perfect fit, and more.
And because gold lasts so long, opting for a gold crown or bridge can potentially save patients money that would have otherwise been spent having a porcelain implant replaced several times.
Refining Gold Bridges & Crowns
Bridges and crowns are among the most common types of dental restorations. A dental bridge is used to replace one or more missing teeth, while a crown restores a decayed or worn-down tooth. Some crowns are completely made of metal, and others may contain both porcelain and metal (PFM = porcelain-fused-to-metal).
Metal bridges and crowns contain both gold and other metals, some precious, such as silver, platinum, palladium, copper, zinc and more. While the term “gold crown” is common, gold crowns and bridges are never made of pure gold. Pure gold is too soft to withstand daily chewing and biting, so other metals are added to enhance durability. Much like gold, white precious metals like platinum and palladium also offer exceptional resistance to tarnish and biocompatibility.
Getting Top Dollar for Your Dental Metals
No dental crown or bridge will last forever. When the time comes to recycle your dental gold, it’s important to work with a trusted refinery like Garfield to get the most cash in return for your scrap. Keep in mind that it’s virtually impossible to estimate the value of dental scrap material (unless you’re a dental lab technician who made the items yourself) without sending it to a refinery to conduct a melt and assay.
An assay is a procedure performed at a precious metals refinery that can only be conducted once the metal is melted down and transformed into a homogeneous state, so that an accurate sample of the alloy can be tested. Assays provide a detailed breakdown of the material’s components, identifying each metal present and in which quantities. Once we know how much gold and/or silver, platinum and palladium you have, we can offer a competitive payment based on the current market prices of the metals!
While it may be easy to find online “calculators” for guessing gold scrap value, the results that these tools provide are just rough approximations that could vary greatly from the true value of your scrap.
Always Work Directly with a Refinery
Last but not least, make sure to steer clear of middleman gold buyers. If a gold scrap buyer is not a refinery, they will need to sell your material elsewhere (a refinery) to see any value. Therefore, they must underpay for the scrap in order to obtain a profit. Avoid these extra fees by working directly with a trusted refiner!
Garfield Refining has been servicing dentists, dental labs and individual sellers since 1892. Leading dentists agree that we’re the best in the business when it comes to refining – that’s why we’ve been voted Best Refiner by Dentaltown Magazine readers for 14 years in a row.
If you’re looking to refine your dental gold, Garfield makes the process easy. Download a free, insured shipping label to get started today!