If you work with precious metals, you already know that not all of your material ends up in a finished product. Filings, dust, offcuts, bench sweepings, polishing residue. It builds up over time, and it’s easy to let it sit in a jar or a bag somewhere without really thinking about what it’s worth.

But here’s the thing. Those lemels and sweeps contain real, recoverable gold and silver. And depending on how much you’ve accumulated, the value could be a lot more than you think.

At SMP Bullion, we offer a full lemel and sweep processing service for trade customers, right here at our Birmingham facility. Whether you’ve got a small pot of clean filings or bags of workshop sweepings, we can extract the precious metal content and either pay you its value or return it to you as a bar. Your choice.

What Are Lemels and Sweeps?

For anyone not familiar with the terminology, lemels are the fine metal filings and shavings produced during jewellery manufacturing, repair, and finishing work. Every time you file, saw, or shape a piece of gold or silver, tiny particles of precious metal are created. Over weeks and months of bench work, these accumulate into a meaningful quantity.

Sweeps are broader. They include floor sweepings, dust from polishing stations, residue from buffing wheels, and any other workshop waste that might contain traces of precious metal. Sweeps are generally less pure than lemels because they’re mixed with other materials like polishing compounds, dust, paper fibres, and non-precious metallic particles. But they still contain recoverable gold and silver.

Both are a natural byproduct of working with precious metals, and both have genuine value that’s worth recovering.

Our Transparent Melt Service for Lemels

This is something we’re genuinely proud of, because as far as we know, it’s the only service of its kind in the UK.

If your lemel is clean and free of polishings, paper, and non-precious metallics, we’ll melt it right in front of you. You watch the entire process. There’s no sending it off, no waiting around, and no wondering what’s happening to your metal behind closed doors.

Once melted, we XRF test the resulting bar to determine the exact precious metal content, and we give you the value there and then. The whole process takes around 30 minutes.

If you’d rather keep the bar than take the cash, you can. You just pay the melt fee and walk away with your gold or silver in bar form. It’s completely up to you.

This level of transparency matters. In an industry where trust is everything, being able to watch your metal being processed from start to finish gives you total confidence in the result. No guesswork, no mystery, no wondering whether you’ve been given a fair deal.

Melt Fees

Our lemel melt fees are straightforward and based on weight:

50g to 100g: £60 + VAT

100g to 250g: £95 + VAT

250g to 500g: £100 + VAT

500g to 1kg: £105 + VAT

1kg to 5kg: £110 + VAT

That’s it. Clear pricing, no hidden extras.

How We Process Sweeps

Sweeps are a different story to clean lemels. Because they contain a mixture of precious and non-precious materials, they require a more involved process to extract the recoverable metal.

Here’s how it works.

First, your sweeps are burned down to ash. This removes any organic material, paper, polishing compounds, and other combustible contaminants.

Next, the ash is milled into a fine powder and sieved to ensure consistency. A representative sample of the powder is then sent to the Sheffield Assay Office for independent testing. This gives you an accurate, third-party verified assessment of the precious metal content in your sweeps.

Once we receive the assay results, we call you with the value. Your powder is kept completely separate throughout the entire process, so there’s no mixing with anyone else’s material. Nothing happens until you confirm you’re happy with the result.

The whole process takes around 7 to 10 working days. It’s longer than the lemel melt service, but that’s because of the additional steps involved in separating and testing mixed materials. The trade-off is a thorough, independently verified result you can trust.

Why Bother Recovering Metal from Lemels and Sweeps?

If you’ve been working with gold and silver for any length of time, the cumulative value of your workshop waste can be surprisingly high. Jewellers who process their lemels regularly often find that the recovered metal pays for new materials, covers overhead costs, or provides a welcome bonus on top of their regular income.

Think about it practically. If you’re working with gold every day, even small amounts of filing dust and offcuts add up over weeks and months. A jeweller producing just 2g of gold lemel per day would accumulate over 500g in a year. At current gold prices, that’s a very significant sum.

Silver lemels accumulate even faster due to the nature of silversmithing work. And while silver is worth less per gram than gold, the volumes involved can easily make recovery worthwhile.

The alternative is to let it sit there gathering dust, which is essentially the same as leaving money on the floor. Literally, in the case of sweeps.

The Case for Keeping Your Metal as a Bar

When we process your lemels, you have the option of taking the cash value or keeping the resulting bar. There are good reasons to consider the second option.

If you take cash, that money goes into your bank account and immediately starts losing value to inflation. It’s useful if you need the liquidity, but it’s not working particularly hard for you.

If you keep the bar, you retain ownership of a physical precious metal asset that has historically appreciated over time. Gold and silver have both delivered strong returns over the past decade, and holding your recovered metal in bar form means you’re positioned to benefit from any future price increases.

It’s also a form of saving that doesn’t rely on any financial institution. There’s no counterparty risk, no exposure to bank failures or market crashes. It’s your metal, in your hands, and it’s worth whatever the market says gold or silver is worth on any given day.

For trade customers who are already comfortable working with precious metals, this is a natural extension of what you do. You’re just closing the loop on your own production process and keeping the value within your business.

Who Can Use This Service?

Our lemel and sweep processing service is available to registered trade customers. This includes jewellers, goldsmiths, silversmiths, dental practices, pawnbrokers, and anyone else who works with precious metals as part of their business.

To use the service, you’ll need to be a registered customer with us. If you’re not already registered, you can sign up for a trade account through our website or by giving us a call.

Tips for Getting the Best Results

A few practical suggestions to help you maximise the value recovered from your lemels and sweeps.

Keep your lemels clean. The cleaner your filings, the simpler and quicker the processing. Separate your gold and silver lemels where possible, and keep them free of polishing compounds, paper, and non-precious metals. Clean lemel qualifies for our transparent melt service, which is faster and more straightforward.

Collect regularly. Don’t wait years between collections. Processing your lemels every few months means you’re consistently recovering value rather than letting it accumulate indefinitely. It also makes the quantities more manageable and the results easier to track.

Separate your sweeps from your lemels. Sweeps require a longer processing time because of the mixed materials involved. By keeping clean lemels separate from general workshop sweepings, you can use the faster melt service for the clean stuff and send the sweeps through the full refining process.

Use a dedicated collection system. Line your bench skin, use a lemel drawer, and vacuum your workspace regularly with a filter system that captures fine particles. The more disciplined you are about collection, the more metal you’ll recover over time.

Get in Touch

If you’ve got lemels or sweeps that need processing, or if you’d just like to know more about how the service works, give us a call on 0121 236 9844 or drop us an email at sales@smpbullionanddiamonds.co.uk.

You can also visit us at our facility in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. If you’ve got clean lemel, we can melt it while you wait and have you sorted within half an hour.

Your workshop waste has real value. Let’s make sure none of it goes to waste.