Supply & Mining

Affinage denotes the industrial cleaning and processing of raw precious metals to trade- or investment-grade fineness.

All-in Sustaining Costs (AISC) are a standardised metric of the gold-mining industry that captures all the costs required to maintain a mine's current production capacity on an ongoing basis.

A historic gold-extraction process in which liquid mercury dissolves gold and silver out of ore and binds them as an amalgam, which is then separated by heating.

By-product mining refers to the recovery of a precious metal as a secondary product during the extraction of another, primarily targeted raw material.

Conflict gold refers to gold mined in war or crisis zones, the proceeds of which are used to finance armed groups or human-rights abuses.

A hydrometallurgical process for extracting gold in which crushed ore is treated with a dilute sodium cyanide solution to bring gold selectively into solution.

Doré bars are semi-refined raw bars of gold and silver, cast directly at mines or smelters and subsequently processed to fine-metal quality at a refinery.

Mine production describes the total quantity of precious metal recovered from ore through mining, where the ore grade and the economic minimum content (cut-off) determine which material is extracted at all.

The ore grade indicates how many grams of a precious metal (e.g. gold or silver) are contained per tonne of raw ore, and is the most important metric for assessing the economic viability of a mine.

Primary production refers to the extraction of precious metals directly from the ground through mining, as opposed to secondary recovery from recycled material.

Recycling of precious metals refers to the recovery of gold, silver, and platinum group metals from scrap material such as jewellery, electronic waste, and industrial residues through chemical or thermal processing methods.

A refinery separates precious metals from scrap gold, industrial waste and ores and processes them into high-purity fine metal.

Urban mining refers to the targeted recovery of precious metals and other valuable materials from electronic waste, end-of-life devices and industrial waste streams as a complement to primary mining.

Two fundamental mining methods in which ores are extracted either in open-pit surface mining (near the surface) or in underground mining (in deep tunnels and shafts).

Fairtrade Gold is certified gold from artisanal and small-scale mining that meets minimum social standards, environmental requirements and a binding Fairtrade premium on top of the market price.