You might never have thought about or expected it, but taking your ring in for cleaning leaves some small silver, gold, or platinum nuggets behind for the jeweler.

Don’t worry, your jeweler isn’t chopping pieces off from your jewelry when making them all shiny again. Buffing and cleaning a ring results in minute amounts of silver, gold or platinum wearing away. It’s normal.

In fact, weighing your ring before and after a cleaning normally shows no difference unless a most sensitive scale is used.

But for the jeweler, those minute dust particles add up after months and months of cleanings.

Does the precious metal dust just get vacuumed away or pulled into the air filters like normal dust? Yes, except…

Those vacuum bags, air filters, dust rags, etc. are often saved, boxed up and stored. Then, after a few months, they’re all sent away to a refinery to get sifted, burned and melted down into precious metal bars.

With gold at $884 an ounce and platinum at $2,087 (as of May 9), that’s a few thousand dollars of "extra" money.

Interesting? Not as much as this video describing and showing it all: