Silver plate scraping ?

[acevillav]

Does anybody scrap silver plate? I was thinking most of it is silver over copper I'm not sure if the yard will take it or what I can expect to get from it. Any ideas..........Thanks

 

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[Powerwasher]

My limited experience has pretty lead me to believe that silver plating is usually over tin or some sort of similar metals.

Anyone else know different?

 

[goldsilverpro]

Silver plate is usually on a copper alloy, such as brass. On plated silverware, the base metal is often a white copper alloy, such as nickel silver (which, regardless of its name, actually contains no silver). Silver is usually plated from 50 to 100 millionths of an inch thick, which has a dollar value of about 1 to 2 cents per square inch of plated area. There are many exceptions to this (very high quality silverware, e.g.) but most would fall in that range. The problem is that most of the chemicals that dissolve silver (nitric acid, cyanide, etc.) also dissolve copper. Therefore, there is no profitable way that I know of to recover the silver. For this reason, I doubt if there are any refiners that will process it. To some scrap dealers, it is considered to be contaminated copper scrap. In essence, no one wants it.

EDIT: After looking at this more closely, I must admit that I have changed my views on this. You may want to check out this link, where we recently discussed it more completely.
http://www.goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=16166&start=0

 

[Davers]

I would quess you could sell it as brass or copper, bronze? .If thats the underlying metal or alloy

 

[cyberdan]

My recycler just throws it in with the brass. $1.60 lb +/-

but double check, I always take a file to one area on the bottom of platters and pitchers. many times the base metal is copper $3.00 lb +/-