Silver Doré
An unrefined alloy of silver, often with traces of gold, poured directly from a mine's own processing plant and later shipped to a refinery for final purification into bullion.
Covered in 1 MetalsCost.com News Intelligence article, most recently on August 15, 2026.
Overview
Silver doré is the semi-refined bar a mine pours straight from its own processing plant, long before the metal reaches bullion-market purity. The name comes from the French word for "gilded," a nod to the fact that doré bars are rarely pure silver alone — most carry meaningful amounts of gold, along with traces of copper, lead or zinc left over from the ore. Because doré is unrefined, its exact composition varies mine to mine and even batch to batch, so it's assayed and settled by weight and metal content rather than traded as a standardized commodity the way LBMA good-delivery bars are. Mines produce doré because building a full-scale refinery on site rarely makes economic sense; it's far cheaper to ship a compact, dense bar to a specialist refinery than to ship raw ore or the equipment needed for final purification.
How It's Manufactured
Doré bars come out of a mine's own metallurgical plant, using processes suited to whatever ore the mine produces — cyanide leaching followed by Merrill-Crowe zinc precipitation or carbon-in-pulp recovery for many silver and gold ores, or a flotation-and-smelting route for silver that occurs alongside lead, copper or zinc sulfides. Whichever path is used, the goal is the same: strip out as much waste rock as practical, then pour the recovered precious metals into a solid ingot. The pour happens in an induction or resistance furnace on site, with the molten metal cast into bar-shaped molds and cooled before being sampled for assay, weighed, and sealed for transport, typically under tight security given the value concentrated in each bar.
Byproducts
Getting to doré generates far more waste than product. Tailings — the ground-up, leached-out rock left after silver and gold are extracted — make up the overwhelming majority of material a mine processes and must be stored in engineered tailings facilities or used for underground backfill. Where silver occurs in polymetallic ore alongside lead, zinc or copper sulfides, the mine typically produces separate base-metal concentrates as saleable byproducts rather than waste, providing extra revenue that can lower the effective cost of the silver itself. Cyanide-leach operations also generate a used leach solution that must be detoxified before discharge or recycled back into the circuit, and smelting-route operations produce slag that sometimes finds use in construction aggregate.
Who Consumes It
Doré's only real customer is the refining industry — specialty precious-metals refiners such as Asahi, Metalor and Valcambi, along with large integrated refiners like Johnson Matthey, that have the acid-leaching and electrolytic capacity to separate gold from silver and remove remaining base metals. Some large mining companies with multiple operations run their own centralized refineries and consolidate doré from several mines internally rather than selling it externally. Refiners buy doré on assay terms, paying the mine for its metal content minus a treatment charge and refining losses, and the resulting standardized bars then flow into the bullion market, where the actual downstream buyers — jewelers, coin mints, industrial silver users and investors — purchase finished silver and gold rather than doré itself.
Everyday Uses
Ordinary consumers never encounter doré directly — it's an intermediate industrial product that exists for only a short time between the mine and the refinery. But every silver coin, silver bar, piece of jewelry or silver-containing electronic component ultimately traces back through a doré bar at some point in its supply chain, since virtually all newly mined silver passes through this unrefined stage before being purified to bullion or industrial-grade standards. In that sense, doré is the invisible first link in a chain that eventually reaches ordinary buyers as recognizable products.
Industrial Uses
Doré itself isn't used industrially — it's a feedstock, not a finished material — but the refining process it triggers is a critical link in supply chains for both precious and, incidentally, base metals. Refining doré yields not just investment-grade silver and gold but also recovers the base metals that traveled along with it, feeding those separated streams back into copper, lead or zinc supply chains. The doré route also lets mining companies monetize gold that occurs as a minor byproduct of silver mining, or vice versa, without needing to build separate processing circuits for each metal — a practical solution to the genuinely mixed-metal problem of economically recovering several valuable metals from one ore body.
