Precious Metal Recovery
Precious Metal Refining
Bel Air Finishing offers a comprehensive precious metal refining service tailored to meet the unique needs of your business. This service ensures that precious metal-bearing materials are processed with precision, transparency, and efficiency. From thermal reduction to chemical processing, it delivers exceptional value for recycling programs by recovering maximum precious metal content.
We use advanced techniques such as Thermal Reduction to prepare materials for further refining through processes like induction melting, sweeps processing, or chemical digestion. Materials such as semiconductor tooling, electroplated substrates, and cyanide or acid-based solutions are chemically processed to recover valuable metals. Every step is managed with care, from transport and inspection to refining and settlement.
What to Expect:
- Customized Recycling Plans: Work with a dedicated representative to determine the most effective refining solutions for your materials.
- Secure Material Transport: Logistics support ensures seamless freight arrangements and accurate documentation upon arrival.
- State-of-the-Art Refining: Processes include thermal reduction, milling, chemical digestion, and sampling, ensuring uniform materials ready for analysis.
- Precise Laboratory Analysis: In-house testing determines the total precious metal content using industry-standard techniques like fire assay, XRF, and wet chemical analysis.
- Transparent Settlements: Access detailed reports of your materials’ precious metal content, with flexible settlement options including checks, wire transfers, or physical metal returns.
Typical Applications:
- Recycling catalytic converters
- Recycling mother boards/circuit
- Strip stock blanking scrap
- Recycling sludge waste
Precious Metals We Can Refine:
- Gold
- Silver
- Copper
- Tantalum
- Platinum
- Palladium
- Rhodium
From start to finish, this service combines expertise, advanced refining methods, and unparalleled transparency, helping you recover more value from your precious metal materials.
Waste Water Recovery

AquaSafe is a very unique product with a wide spectrum of precious metal recovery equipment uses and users. Our turnkey precious metal recovery equipment systems fill a niche where it does not make sense to engineer an enormous precious metal recovery equipment or wastewater system. With Aqua Safe, precious metal recovery is done in one step in a single tank. Rarely is pretreatment necessary. Wastewater is pumped into the tank to the appropriate volume. Vigorous mixing is initiated and then the dry powder formulation is added in correct amount (determined by our lab). After about two minutes of agitation, the mixer is shut off and flocculation and settling begins immediately.
Depending on tank size, but usually within ten to thirty minutes, the floc has settled to a dense sludge, leaving clear liquid above. After decanting, clarified water, coolants or cleaners are ready to be reused. Sludge is ready for drying and disposal.
The system is easily automated and requires no skilled personnel for operation. Aqua Safe is nonhazardous, easily handled and has a long shelf life. Existing systems and equipment can usually be utilized or retrofitted. Specialized equipment or complete turnkey precious metal recovery equipment and wastewater treatment systems are available from Bel Air.

Aquasafe is a fast, efficient, economical and easy to use wastewater treatment technology for a variety of industrial wastewaters. It provides a dense, non leachable sludge and clear water usually suitable for recycling or discharge.
What works and what does not work:
Aqua Safe’s unique chemistry provides a rapid and efficient encapsulation and separation in a wide spectrum of wastewaters. In most cases, it is only necessary to indentify the appropriate blend, dosage and equipment, perhaps with simple pretreatment chemistry. However, Aqua Safe will not remove certain soluble organic chemicals, sugars, starches or alcohols (including glycols.)

How it Works:
Aqua Safe causes a series of chemical and physical reactions which result in contaminants being encapsulated in a developing floc, which then sinks to the bottom of the vessel.
The Aqua Safe wastewater treatment results in a mass that both encapsulates and removes contaminants. The clarified liquid is decanted and filtered, sludge is then filtered and collected. Drying can be accomplished with any appropriate dewatering technology. Clarified water, coolant or cleaner is recycled, dried sludge is sent to a landfill according to local regulations.
| Model | Description |
|---|---|
| WW-100 | All-purpose product that works quickly and dramatically in many situations. For this reason, it is the first product to try in a demonstration or test. |
| WW-200 | Particularly efficacious in vibratory finishing, tumbling or cleaning wastewaters. It takes a little longer to floc in, but in many cases, is an excellent choice. |
| WW-300 | Proven to be very good in most oily water or grease situations. It needs more time to floc than the previously mentioned blends. May result in a lower pH. |
| WW-380 | Another blend to try if the others do not work well. Sometimes, under some wastewater conditions, this is a functional blend. |
| WW-250 | New product that works under many conditions. It takes longer to floc but often produces a superior sludge. |
| WW-450 | Slurry useful in oily water situations or with large flow rates. It can break emulsions and start to floc by itself but is best used with WW-600. |
| WW-400 | Slurry a flocculating aid and, sometimes, a treatment of first choice. It is used in lightly contaminated wastewaters or waters with suspended solids. Needs WW-600 for flocculation. If a floc from an Aqua Safe treatment is a little fluffy, it sometimes does not quite settle and a drop or so of WW-400 may tighten up the floc and effect rapid settling and separation. |
