X-ray vision: a surprising source of recycled silver

The Ripple necklace by jewellery label Angharad encircles the neck in delicate, undulating silver waves. It’s a fluid, organic design and, like all the silver pieces created by London-based designer Meghan Griffiths, it is entirely made of silver extracted from old medical X-rays. (X-ray films contain emulsions of silver halide crystals, which are light sensitive and create the images that we see on X-ray files.)

“When I started my brand it was really important to me I was making conscious decisions about where materials were coming from,” says Griffiths, who launched Angharad in 2020. “There is no other option that has the same level of traceability within silver,” she says of the project, called AgAIN Silver, which was launched in 2022 by Birmingham-based precious metal refining and recovery business Betts.

To talk about recycling in the jewellery industry is to enter a greenwashing minefield. With sustainability playing an increasingly important role in consumers’ minds, a growing number of brands are advertising the use of recycled gold and silver in their jewellery lines as a sustainability push, but precious metals have been recovered, smelted and turned into something new for centuries.

The practice has not led to a decrease in the amount of new gold and silver that is mined every year: according to The World Gold Council and The Silver Institute, in 2022 mine production and recycled supply of gold and silver both increased over 2021 levels. Moreover, simply repurposing silver jewellery or silver objects to make new silver jewellery doesn’t equate to “recycling” as there is no repurposing of waste in the process. (It is unlikely that owners will throw away even old silver jewellery and silver objects as they often do with clothing, for example.)

Sandra Wilson, who teaches ecological metal design at the University of Dundee, says 70-80 per cent of gold in circulation is recycled metal, which can be a mix of old jewellery and precious metals recovered from other waste. In this context, “it’s not enough to say this is recycled”, she says. “You need to give us more information about where it comes from, what processes it has been through, how it’s been transformed from raw material into a finished piece of jewellery.”

Betts’ managing director Charles Betts, who represents the ninth consecutive generation of the Betts family to manage the company, has grappled with this issue as well. Since it was founded in 1760, the business has processed waste from the jewellery industry, recovered and refined the precious metal from it, and resold it to jewellers. The company, which also has a manufacturing business, has been recovering silver from medical and industrial X-ray film for decades, mixing it with other repurposed silver from the jewellery trade. “My big problem with recycled [metals] is, it’s a very easy claim to make — in a certain way gold and silver endlessly get reused and recycled,” admits Betts. “You see a lot of jewellery brands saying this now and I think there is a problem because there is no detail around what that means.”

What makes AgAIN Silver different is that it only contains silver extracted from medical X-rays, which would otherwise end up in landfill, be incinerated or stored by the NHS and private hospitals at a cost of as much as £40,000 a year. “This is genuine reclamation,” explains Betts. “It’s not just remelting an alloy or changing the use of a product, it’s taking something that was a waste product, reclaiming the silver from it, then recycling the plastic and the paper.”

The project also generates revenue for the NHS trusts and private hospitals involved, which receive a rebate from the company (the figure depends on the volume of film, the amount of silver recovered and the amount of work needed to recover it, but some trusts have received a rebate of tens of thousands of pounds, according to Betts). The silver recovered is sold at a very modest premium compared with generic recycled silver, making it a viable alternative for independent jewellers such as London-based Griffiths and Emefa Cole, and organisations such as The Royal Mint.

The process is labour intensive, however. Each X-ray file usually includes cardboard and paper as well as the film — elements that need to be manually segregated and inspected to make sure the records in question can be destroyed (by law adult medical records usually need to be kept for at least eight years after treatment). The film then goes through a chemical process that dissolves the silver contained in it, leaving a clear plastic PET that can be recycled separately. The silver obtained is put through an electroplating process for up to three weeks, at the end of which it is melted down into a silver bar, which is around 96 per cent pure. The final step is the refining process, which uses silver nitrate to dissolve the silver from that bar and re-plate it into 100 per cent pure silver.

Traditional recovery of silver from X-ray film would involve burning the film, but Betts says his company’s hydro-metallurgical process includes only mild acids (about 15ml per litre), making their process “comparatively low impact”. For each kilogramme of X-ray films it processes, it extracts between two and five grammes of silver, meaning that to make a single silver wedding band, weighing approximately 5g, will require around 50 sheets of X-ray film. “It’s not a cheap process, but it’s cost effective,” says Betts, who had to install new refining cells specifically for AgAIN Silver. “But you are talking ten of thousands, rather than hundreds of thousands.”

The company has recovered 250 tonnes of X-ray film so far. Betts estimates the UK supply will be enough for the next five years. After that, the company might need to start sourcing from other countries where physical X-ray film has yet to be replaced by digital records, as has already happened in the UK. (Betts recently imported film from South America and is considering using international sourcing to extend AgAIN Silver’s life.)

Despite it being a finite project, the University of Dundee’s Wilson has a favourable view on AgAIN Silver, especially for its ethical commitment to the NHS, transparency and traceability (at least from the X-ray film, though it is not possible to establish the provenance of the silver to make the film itself). “Ultimately, though, we need to develop on all of the fronts,” she says, underlining the importance of advancing and improving recycling from e-waste, still a relatively untapped source of precious metals. (Only 17 per cent of the 53.6mn tonnes of e-waste produced every year across the world is properly recycled, according to the UN.)

Betts knows that AgAIN Silver is just one among the many approaches needed to advance more ethical and sustainable practices. “Recycling cannot satisfy global precious metal demand,” he says. “You also need to drive better practice within mining, so you have a sustainable social and environmental impact in those areas. People need to have a much more nuanced approach to metal sourcing. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.” 

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