All that glitters may not be gold, but recovery technologies for this sought-after metal present a sparkling diamond for oxygen, as Tony Wheatly finds out.
Gold may be the most noble of metals chemically speaking and its long-term price trend reflects continued demand, but the terrible cost of winning this coveted metal from ‘mother earth’, both in terms of human injury or death and environmental devastation, are mounting.
Gold is not only different from most metals because of its chemical and physical properties but the market supply and demand also exhibits unique properties. Despite continual research and periodic announcements to the contrary, gold is not an industrially valuable commodity.
Market Trends
Gold demand is very much harder to evaluate than production, because while production is concentrated in a relatively small number of mines, demand is distributed throughout the world and some of the difficulties are:
Many buyers of gold are deliberately secretive.
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