>>60900046
>Well yeah, about half of that silver is lost/unrecoverable or will otherwise never be available for sale.
When the price gets high enough you can profitably cyanide leach old landfills for PMs, including gold, silver and platinum.

When the price gets high enough..

But you are 100% correct, much of the silver used is forever unrecoverable, such as silver batteries in munitions that gets atomized, silver batteries in sonobouys that are lost in the ocean, silver batteries in missiles and rockets that burn up. There are about 225 million ounces of silver alloy nuclear control rods that are expected to be radioactive for 400 years in storage. More get added every year.
https://www.silverwars.com/nuclear-blunder-us-designed-radioactive-silver-stockpile/