Uses for Silver

[FiftySense]

My favorite metal has many uses. The most important in my book is water purification. My Katadyn Pocket Water Filter is silver impregnated and will filter thousands of gallons before needing replacement. Below are more uses:


Silver Uses

Although silver is relatively scarce, it is the most plentiful and least expensive of the precious metals. The largest silver producing countries are Mexico, Peru, the United States, Australia and Chile. Sources of silver include; silver mined directly, silver mined as a by-product of gold, copper, lead and zinc mining, and silver extracted from recycled materials, primarily used photographic materials. Today, silver bullion stocks make up a significant component of silver supply.

The demand for silver comes primarily from three areas; industrial uses, jewelry and silverware, and photography. These industries represent 95 percent of annual silver consumption. Silver’s superior properties make it a highly desirable industrial component in manufactured products. Silver’s artistic beauty and status make it one of the most romantic and sought after precious metals.

Diversity is silver’s primary asset. Its unique properties include beauty, strength, sensitivity to light, malleability and ductility, electrical and thermal conductivity, reflectivity and the ability to endure extreme temperature changes. These properties allow groundbreaking research to be conducted by scientists and engineers that effect the way we live.

Silver more than other precious metals, has significant demand rooted in sectors as diverse as imaging, electronics, jewelry, coinage, superconductivity and water purification. For this reason, silver is no longer known as just a precious metal, a store of value, a work of art or an industrial metal. It is all of these. Today silver is indispensable, working all around us to improve the quality of our lives.

Learn More
To learn more about the uses of silver, please visit:
http://www.silverinstitute.org/

[crazychicken]

Great post!

CC

[FiftySense]

Great post!

CC


Thanks CC

[JDRock]

nice thread!.

[mamboni]

RFID: This technology will make silver indispensable for industry

--> The RFID technology is about to experience a big change in the silver sector
Radio Frequency Identification Technology (RFID) must almost certainly be classified as one of the biggest technological revolutions after the internet and the cell phone boom. This immense change won’t just influence the logistics sector and the retail trade, but will also have a significant effect on our society.

Description of RFID technology
The by far most interesting range of application for silver in the future will probably be the Radio Frequency Identification, because this technology will change society, compared to what internet and cell phones did that caused changes in society as new products then.
But what is RFID system exactly all about?
A RFID system consists of two major components.
On the one side, there’s a very small radio chip – also called tag or transponder – and on the other side, you’ll find a reading device.
The radio tag consists of a mini- antenna and an electronics component to save data on it. The reading device consists of an antenna and a decoder.
The reader emits radio waves which produce a high frequency alternation electromagnetic field.
However, the operating range depends on power supply and on frequency.
As soon as a radio chip enters an electromagnetic field, this tag will activate and send out information to the reader.
That one reads out the information and transmits the data to a central processor where the info gets processed.

RFID revolutionizes retail industry

Wal-Mart as the world’s largest retailer has already managed to convince one hundred of its most important subcontractors to equip their products with radio tags.
This opens up the possibility to track down goods from earliest production, passing through distributors, till finally arriving at Wal-Mart good shelves, now ready for sale.
Up till now, the company had to spend an amount of 25 billion US dollars for the control system of supplier chains and for management of flow of goods.
In return, the retail giant is going to save 7 percent of all expenses by upgrading to RFID tags – in figures 1.76 billion US dollars.
It will still take some time, of course, till all companies will have equipped their devices with radio chips. Wal-Mart, however, is not left alone with the task of distributing RFID, other giants of the retail business stand aside – Metro and Tesco for example. In addition to the installation of the reading devices, true worldwide product standards must be met. The association EPCglobal union developed the Electronic Product Code (EPC). The code (a number) consists of three data groups which allow exactly identifying and registering every single product in the world.

This Electronic Product Code will sooner or later replace the Universal Product Code (UPC barcode).
The EPC expands the accuracy of labeling by exactly marking single articles with a serial number, instead of putting the same code on all cereal boxes of the same kind and the same producer.
Till summer of 2005, the few American and European radio tags in use sent out very different wave lengths. However, this has profoundly changed because the EPCglobal union succeeded in pushing through worldwide global standards.
Furthermore, the radio chips have only been affixed to pallets and that again by just a few companies.
Fact is that radio tags not only save billions of dollars to companies on logistics levels, but furthermore protect products of theft and piracy. Thus, management in big companies calls for large-scale application of it in mass markets. A distribution from pure pallets to cardboard boxes has already been done with great success.
The price of an RFID tag dropped subsequently to a level that the price-performance ratio finally matches.
With the introduction of RFID in the salesrooms of big retailers, the whole market and consequently also the logistics sector will be affected by a gigantic reorganization.
The use of RFID in the clothing industry is of special interest either.
As the first enterprise worldwide Lemmi Fashion, producer of fashion for kids, equipped the entire logistics chain with RFID technology and so realized a far-reaching merchandise management (Microsoft Business Solutions). Levi Strauss&Co., maker of famous casual wear, began to provide their jeans with RFID tags. Compared to the barcode, RFID radio tags make exact identity classification of a single product possible.
The future in our supermarket will probably look like this: at the end of your purchase you will produce your charge or store card and then get registered by a card reader upon leaving the store. Only seconds later the amount due of your purchase will automatically be debited to your bank or credit account. There will be no cashiers anymore as soon as this technology works to full satisfaction.You, as a valued customer of the store won’t have to worry anymore about long lines at cash desks.

And what has RFID got to do with silver ?

Well, RFID tags basically consist of silver! Thereby, a very thin silver foil is used as a high-performance receiver. As already mentioned earlier in the text this technology looks like to replace the conventional barcode. This will mean that the demand for such a tag will get bigger and bigger and consequently lead to a rising price for silver in the long-term.

The presumably biggest application field for RFID which is the retail trade and the logistics sector has already been mentioned in the paragraph above.
In the following passage you’ll find further possible use where RFID chips can be applied, briefly summed up in a few key points:

- The US Department of State has issued a binding ruling that all new American passports must have a RFID chip on it. That explicitly also applies to passports up for renewal.

- Car makers plan to integrate RFID tags in car components, like navigation systems or anti-theft devices.

- In tomorrow’s library every single book will be equipped with a smart-label for identification purposes.

- Full registration of waste bins to individual properties and the full database for monitoring and weighting waste disposal due to RFID as already done in certain parts of the UK.

-The technology is supposed to be used soon for non-contact admission control for high-security labs or similar.

-The US Department of Homeland Security lately started to use RFID technology at five border controls with neighboring Mexico and Canada.

-The US Department of Defense made it obligatory since mid’ 2005 for 100 of its most important subcontractors to put on RFID tags on all its packages and pallets.

- RFID chips have been introduced in a private elementary school in Tokyo, Japan. Students attending this school wear tags on their school bags for registering upon arrival at the compound.

- In November 2004, the American Department of Health or CDC approved the application of “VeriChips” in humans. The transponder of the American company “Applied Digital Solution” is transplanted under the skin. The company advocates these chips for health reason since vital information of the bearer is easily available in case of emergency.

Which quantity of chips will be produced?

In 2007, 3 to 3.5 billion RFID tags are sought to be manufactured. Furthermore the industry expects an increase of up to 8 to 8.5 billions of manufactured labels in 2008. And let’s look ahead! In 2015, 500 to 600 billions of manufactured RFID tags are expected to be produced.

Well, RFID will certainly change our life, won’t it?
Another aspect with immense importance for investors in the silver sector: Once used in producing a radio chip, silver can not be reused or recycled. It is irrevocably lost.This will mean that the demand for silver will rise, while the stock on hand will decrease quickly and heavily.

You can imagine what that will mean for the price of silver!

http://www.silver-info.com/rfid-technology.htm

[mamboni]

The Case for Silver
By: Adrian Ash | Wed, Mar 24, 2010


Four crucial twists in the case for inflation-friendly, growth-friendly silver...

SO CASH-in-the-BANK remains the nearest thing to "risk-free" that the finance industry offers. But risk-free now means "sure-fire loss" thanks to sub-zero real rates of interest.

The longer that interest rates stay below inflation, the more people will be forced to take more risks to defend what money they've got - and one higher-risk choice is buying silver. It's slowly becoming ever-more popular, at least amongst that handful of savers and investors who see tomorrow's inflation in today's monetary policy.

Here at BullionVault for instance, and over the last 12 months or so, we've had more than 250 customers ask when we'll offer silver alongside our gold-dealing and ownership service. No other single comment or query from our 16,500 users comes close. So now, our new silver market means you can trade physical bullion - at live silver prices - and store it securely at low cost in specialist, private vaults outside the banking sector.

You can start with a free ounce of silver today, if you wish. Before you do though, just why might you want to buy, own and trade physical silver anyway?



The case for gold is and increasingly plain, as Société Générale strategist Dylan Grice notes in his much-quoted Popular Delusions this week.

Sub-zero real rates of interest, plus huge and irreversible government deficits - funded by central banks printing cash - make this rare, internationally recognized and tightly supplied monetary asset as highly appealing as a store of wealth as it has ever been through 7,000 years of known history.

Silver, on the other hand, was ousted by gold bullion as the world's monetary anchor in the mid-to-late 19th century. But it remained a medium of exchange well into the 20th century, and long after gold had vanished from sight too, buried in central-bank vaults to be represented above-ground by paper notes only.

Because silver is more than 17 times as plentiful as gold in the earth's crust, its use as money - both in coin and as a measure of value - is far more common in the historical archives as well. Whereas today, it holds much the same basic appeal as gold, but with four crucial twists:

#1. Gold/Silver Ratio
Historically (meaning from the dawn of recorded time to around 1900), one ounce of gold typically bought 15 or 16 ounces of silver, and pretty much everywhere in the world too. Today, that ratio stands at 65 times in the wholesale spot gold and silver bullion markets. (It's very much worse again if you're trading small bars and coins, thanks to dealer mark-ups and margins.) Many analysts and investors now expect the ratio to fall back towards its long-term mean, if not quite reach it. Even the 20th century average would see silver doubling in value against gold - which itself, of course, plenty of people now see going higher against the Dollar, Euro and Pound Sterling anyway.

#2. Consumption
Whereas pretty much all the gold ever mined in history is still available - closely guarded but ready-at-hand as jewelry, bars and coins - silver is somewhat closer to commodities like crude oil, soybeans or orange, in that it often vanishes in its use. Consumption rarely affects gold, but silver's lower value means recycling and recovering it isn't always economical. And because it tends to be a by-product of other mining operations (mostly gold or copper), rather than dug up for its own sake, analysts don't see silver's primary supply as responsive as gold or base metals to changes in price.

#3. Industrial Demand
Unlike gold, silver is predominantly used by industry today. So rather than offering deflation protection (as gold most recently did after the collapse of Lehman Bros.), silver is strictly inflation-friendly, with a number of fast-growing uses in both developed and emerging economies making it look very growth-friendly, too. Excluding silver investing demand, London's VM Group analysts now forecast an additional 350 million ounces of annual silver demand by 2020 thanks to:

■RFID tags for stock control and ID cards are "taking over from bar codes";
■Solar panels - forecast to grow by 20-40 times in 10 years;
■Wood preservatives to replace arsenic;
■Wound care & other medical use, food hygiene, and anti-odor textiles - because silver, a biocide, inhibits bacteria.
This growth might soon eat itself, of course, if industrial demand forces silver prices sharply higher. But VM's forecast compares with total industrial demand of 450 million ounces in 2008, according to the mining-backed Silver Institute. Meaning the case for silver doesn't rest solely on monetary chaos.

#4. Volatility
On average, and across the last 42 years, a 1% move in gold is matched by a 1.75% move in silver, both up and down. Anyone expecting strong gains in gold, in other words, should expect exaggerated gains in silver, but with greater risk. Just check the spike of January 1980 for proof. Gold prices tripled in the last 6 months of the preceding year, but silver prices rose 5.7 times over, peaking at $50 an ounce. The subsequent drop was just as severe, and much longer-lived.

What makes silver prices more volatile than gold? As US oil tycoons the Hunt brothers found when they very nearly cornered the world's near-term silver supplies and forced that $50 peak 30 years ago, silver is a very much smaller market by value. The wholesale bullion market in London - heart of the world's gold and silver trading - turns over 18 times as much money in gold as it does in silver each day. Physical demand each year, though nearly 8 times larger than gold by weight, is estimated to be worth barely 11% of global gold demand at $15.2 billion.

Moreover, within those annual figures, gold's use as a store-of-value (meaning investment bars and coins, plus jewelry) accounts for 87% of annual demand according to the GFMS consultancy. In the silver market, only 35% of annual off-take goes to storing wealth (investment, jewelry, silverware). That makes silver much more dependent on industrial demand, and explains why - very occasionally - it more closely tracks movements in the price of copper than gold.

Still, investors aren't (or shouldn't be) looking for "diversification" when they add silver to their gold holdings. Not in the sense of diversification that your financial advisor would use, just before you remind how much you're losing in the bank and how much you stand to lose on bonds should inflation take hold. The average daily correlation between gold and silver, right back to March 1968, has been +0.62 (rolling one-month basis). It would be +1.0 if they moved precisely in lock-step, and -1.0 if they moved precisely opposite. Gold's correlation with US stocks over both the last 40 and 10 years, for comparison, is almost exactly zero. Gold's famous correlation with the Euro has been +0.51 since the start of 2000. Whereas, during the bull market of the last 10 years, the statistical link between gold and silver has risen to average +0.68, and it's stronger again at +0.77 for the last 5 years.

Silver, in short, tends to follow gold very closely - more closely than pretty much any pair of assets you can name over the long term - but with bells on. Risk-free it ain't, but neither is cash-in-the-bank. The appeal of buying silver to profit from inflation looks set to gain ground.

[crazychicken]

Very interesting read.

A bunch of info--and ideas.

Thanks

CC

[uranian]

just saw an interview with adrian douglas of GATA on youtube where he noted that, at present rates, there will be no silver left to mine in around 10 years. solution being much higher silver prices so that recycling (as is done with gold, apparently the average CPU contains v. approx $10 worth of gold) becomes economically viable. vid is on GATA's youtube channel (called an interview with the BBC, which surprised me, only to find it's with Bullion Bulls Canada!)