Postal Gold Blog – Everything About Gold

Gold is one of the most useful minerals mined today because of its unique properties.  It is durable, highly malleable and can withstand many extreme conditions.

Here are a few interesting facts about the use of gold in industry:

• Of all the gold that gets mined yearly, 10% is used for industrial purposes – about 400 tonnes of gold.  Most of this gold is used in Japan, followed closely by the USA.

• Gold is a good electrical and thermal conductor.  Because of this, it is found in almost all electronic devices, including mobile phones, washing machines and even pocket calculators.  The gold used in electronic devices is refined until it is nearly 100% pure, and it is then stretched into a thin wire that is one hundredth of a millimetre in diameter (gold is extremely malleable when pure).  The wire is then used to connect semi-conductors and circuits.

• Gold is crucial in the telecommunications industry.  The diaphragms of telephone mouthpieces contain gold, and it is also used to plate the contacts of phone jacks and connecting cords.

• Gold is also used extensively in aeronautics.  It is an excellent reflector and offers protection against light and infrared rays.  Because of this, pieces of space shuttles are covered with a gold coating in order to reflect radiation and keep the inside temperatures constant.  Astronaut’s helmets have a gold coating on the visors to protect their eyes and skin from solar radiation.  Gold is also used to lubricate parts inside space shuttles because it decreases friction.

• Gold nanoparticles have a wide variety of uses.  They improve solar cell efficiency, are used to make home pregnancy testing kits more effective, and much research is being done on their potential for use in the medical industry.

All in all, gold isn’t just used for pretty objects that adorn our bodies.  It is an extremely useful and practical metal, and much of society depends on it!  Since the amount of gold available for us to mine is dwindling, it is crucial to keep what gold we have in circulation, and recycle old gold.  This is why it is important to send old electronic devices to recycling centres, so that gold and other valuable parts can be re-used.  And if you’re strapped for cash and have scrap gold lying around (such as broken jewellery, gold coins or dental gold), it’s a good idea to send it in to Postal Gold – not only will you be doing a good deed, you’ll also be getting money for it!  Visit the Postal Gold website – Postalgold.com – to find out more about recycling old gold.

Image by Wendy Harman

Up until now, around 150,000 tonnes of gold have been excavated from the earth.  It is estimated that we have 50,000 tonnes left available for mining.  However, it has also long been known that the world’s oceans contain about 6 million tonnes of gold dissolved in sea water.

Naturally, many entrepreneurs and scientists have tried to find ways to extract this gold, dreaming of fortunes untold.  One of the most notable of these was the German chemist Fritz Haber, who received a Nobel Prize in 1918 for developing a way to synthesise ammonia.  After the First World War, Germany was forced to pay an astronomical sum of money in reparations.  Haber decided to investigate the viability of extracting gold from sea water, hoping that it could be a way to help his country pay off these debts.

However, as Haber soon found out, one tonne of sea water contains only a minuscule amount of gold.  The amount varies in different locations, but it can be approximated that a litre of seawater contains 13 billionths of a gram of gold.  Extracting the gold from seawater would produce an amount of gold that would, if you were lucky, barely cover the costs of extracting it in the first place!  And this is provided that the method of extraction is 100% efficient, which is very difficult to ensure.  Haber decided after much experimentation and investigation that the extraction of gold from seawater was highly uneconomical.

However, Haber was not the last person to investigate this possibility.  Since his time, many others have tried to find ways to efficiently extract gold from the sea.  Methods proposed (and rejected) include everything from using mercury to form an amalgam with the gold, to introducing microbes that ‘breathe’ in gold and solidify it in their waste products.

Perhaps the future will see us with advanced technology that will make gold extraction a viable and economic option.  Until then, we will just have to stick with good old fashioned gold mines, as well as recycling old gold.  On that note – if you are looking for gold buyers to recycle your scrap gold, be sure to check out Postal Gold’s website.  Since we can’t yet make gold out of water, we might as well make sure that the gold that we already have stays in circulation!