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Am I correct in believing that it will be unprofitable to remove the silver from silverplate?

Correct.

The way refining is done most commonly I believe is the electrolytic process. The problem lies in that weak sulfuric dissolves silver and strong sulfuric copper, or vice versa, I forget. To do silverplate because of the ratio involved you would spend waaaay more in the acid you used up than you would recover.

This topic has been hashed to death and then rehashed with many good refiners and chemists trying to solve it over at goldrefiningforums.com. The only way feasible, again to my knowledge would be to add pure silver to the silverplate to make the copper amount miniscule, then melt it all together, and refine that. Or perhaps add copper to make the silver part small and refine as with the making of copper anodes. Either way, economically unfeasible.

Copper refiners will take silverplate if you have enough, but forewarning, it is treated as contaminated copper.

Hope this helps a bit.

just as I thought, but without all of the details... lol

thanx