Nickel Free

[Joe]

Hi

I've asked this question through customer services but thought it might be a good one for the forum too as there should be lots of interest...

I know that there are many of areas of your product range that indicate nickel content and you must be actively working on this... Can you make statements about the nickel content of your sheet, wire and grain materials?

I'm particularly interested to know if all of your silver alloys and solders are nickel free.

Cheers

Joe.

[ps_bond]

That piqued my interest Joe - what did you spot that indicates a nickel content?

[Joe]

Nothing untoward! There are a number of materials on the site that have declarations about nickel content - the white gold in particular is carefully marked nickel free.

But there are some known uses of nickel in silver alloys and there isn't any declaration about nickel content for the silver materials listed.

Practically, I don't think it matters, but with the newish EU directives setting very low limits, we aren't able to just ignore even a 0.2% nickel content in solder, say (I know that Hilderbrand do have nickel in some of their silver solder pastes, but would be surprised if they're in the ones sold here).

Being the company they are, I'm sure that this could be one supplier we could trust if they declare all their materials nickel-free!

[Joe]

OK, I've just had an email from the support team at Cookson stating "I can advise that no silver, platinum or palladium alloys contain nickel."

So this is one supplier that you can rely on in those areas.

Notably gold is missing from that list... all but one of the white gold alloys at Cookson I checked had nickel-free declarations (the remaining one was clearly labelled as containing nickel).

Annoyingly, no replies from any of the other suppliers I asked!