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Posts Tagged ‘sell palladium’

We see the word palladium on jewelry store signs, on websites that offer for you to sell your jewelry, and we hear it on TV and the radio. We assume it’s got something to do with jewelry or precious metals, but what the heck is it, really?

Palladium is in the same family of metals as platinum, called (appropriately) platinum group metals (or PGMs). Other PGMs are rhodium, ruthenium, iridium, osmium, and, of course, platinum. All these metals share certain properties, with palladium being the least dense of all the metals in the group. Palldium also has the lowest melting point of these metals.

Palladium was discovered in 1803 as crude palladium ore. It was discovered by William Hyde Wollaston, who peformed chemcial processes to extract the palladium metal from the ore. He named it Palladium after 2 Pallas, an asteroid that was discovered a few years prior. In Greek mythology, Athena accidetnally killed Pallas. Athena felt so guilty that she created a “palladium,” a wooden image of Pallas and took on Pallas’ name.

Wollaston was an accomplished chemist who did a lot of work in the fields of optical theory and electricity. He also invented the process of extracting palladium to extract the metal – it involved dissolving the ore, neutralizing the solution, and then adding certain chemicals to produce the desired effect.

What resulted was palladium, a silvery-white metal that is lustrous. It is relatively rare, but widely useful. It is used in catalytic converters in automobiles. This makes palladium a very useful “green substance”, in a way, because the catalytic converter of a car is what converts the harmful gas emissions of cars into less harmful gases.

Palladium is also used in manufacturing SED/OLED/LCD television sets, in cold fusion technology, and even in dentistry. None of those are the reasons we’ve been seeing this word lately. Palladium has been used to make jewelry since 1939. For a long time palladium was mainly used as an alloy to help make white gold – it has a natural whitish color that makes it so that rhodium plating isn’t necessary. Since 2004, when gold and platinum prices were extra high, jewelers (especially in China) have been making palladium jewelry.

Palladium leaf is used for the illumination of manuscripts. Silver leaf is not great to use because it tarnishes so quickly. Aluminum is hard to work with, and the results are often unsatisfactory. Today, palladium leaf is preferred only second to gold leaf in the art of manuscript illumination.

You can now sell palladium, which reduces environmentally destructive mining. That truly does make the palladium in a catalytic converter a “green” occurrence, as the recovered and recycled palladium can be reused in the increasingly more efficient production of catalytic converters.

As for palladium jewelry, it has the look of platinum at less cost, making it a smart choice for tough economic times.