Word: scrap
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...hard labor, as the thieves carried out 800 lbs. of gold and 3,000 lbs. of silver. They took thousands of 14-karat bracelets and ring mountings and swept up packages of jewelry that were wrapped and ready to be sent to customers. Upstairs, they found silver and gold scrap stored in 50 5-gal. cans. Police believe the thieves were in the building for at least three or four hours and eventually escaped, obviously, by truck. Richard Andrews, the insurance investigator on the case, estimates that the gold and silver could be worth as much as $7 million...
...weight of these charges wasn't enough to convince either the Pentagon or the White House last year to scrap the AVF. Actually, the three services fell only 7 per cent short of their recruiting goals last year, and platoon sergeants swore to New York Times reporters that the latest privates were as good as any they'd seen. More immediately relevant, though, draft registration would neither replace nor bolster the volunteer army. Carter has explicitly stated he doesn't plan to use peacetime conscription to fill recruitment quotas. And the inductees of a peacetime draft are as little likely...
Sellers have discovered that the price their silver fetches as scrap from retail dealers is only a fraction of the spot, or quoted, price for the metal. This spread between scrap and spot prices has been widening because chaotic markets make dealers reluctant to tie up too much cash in expensive inventory. A year ago, when silver was quoted at around $5 an oz., dealers paid customers $3 or $4 an oz., but when silver recently nudged $50, nervous dealers in the Los Angeles area were offering only $10 to $20 an oz. for scrap and sterling flatware...
Dealers pay cash, and then they deliver the scrap to the few smelting companies that have the special furnaces capable of reaching the extraordinarily high temperatures that burn away alloys. Before the dealers are paid, they must wait until the metal is melted down, assayed, and formed into bars by the refiners. In the mean time, dealers take bank loans to finance their inventories. But what used to be a wait of a few weeks for payment has been lengthening to four or five months as the smelters dig out from under growing backlogs. One Manhattan dealer bought so much...
While waiting and hoping for silver prices to decline, Kodak has stepped up its recycling procedures. The company already recovers 20 million oz. of the metal a year in processing amateur film and in scrap from its manufacturing operations. Even the silver that is punched out to make the tiny sprocket holes on 35-mm and home-movie film is meticulously collected and used again...