Increasing demand for Silver comes from MANY sources
While precious metals bulls typically focus on silver as the OTHER precious metals currency (behind gold), the steadily surging demand for silver is not limited to silver as a store of wealth for investors.
A combination of “traditional” uses plus many new applications makes silver a metal which is “precious” in every meaning of the word. To illustrate this point, new patents for silver applications exceed those for any other metal – with many of these new uses related to silver's unquestioned superiority for its anti-bacterial qualities.
There are many information sources for those interested in silver, but the best I have been able to locate is The Silver Institute. One of their categories of information is specifically devoted to the myriad uses for silver.
The Silver Institute chooses to divide these applications into three categories:
a) traditional
b) industrial
c) emerging
Most people will be familiar with silver's three principal uses in this category: photography, jewelry and “silverware”. The Silver Institute also lists coin-demand in this category. Of these uses, only silver's role in photography is declining.
Once we get into silver's “industrial uses”, we now come to an additional factor driving silver demand: namely that it is truly “consumed” in these applications. No, people don't eat it, but it's used in such trace amounts or in chemical compounds where that silver can never be recovered/recycled.
In this category of usage, silver is used in large quantities in batteries (where it is gradually replacing older, lithium-oxide batteries), in high-performance bearings (notably in jet engines), as a chemical catalyst, and also in brazing/soldering and electronics (due to silver's superior electrical conductivity). In all these uses, silver demand is either remaining constant or growing.
While even the previous categories of demand (along with investor demand) are sufficient to drive silver to many multiples of today's prices, it is silver's “emerging” uses which are certain to deplete tiny stockpiles and send prices surging higher.
In this category, we find silver uses multiplying in the field of medicine, because of silver's anti-bacterial properties – with a virtually infinite amount of ways this metal can be used to reduce bacterial infection. For the same reason, silver is acquiring critical importance for water purification – in a world of ever-increasing demand for clean water, while we pollute existing water supplies at an alarming rate.
Solar energy is another area dominated by silver, as the most common type of solar cells rely on silver-based technology.
Lastly, silver's superior reflective properties are driving demand steadily higher for mirrors, in paints, and as a coating for one out of every seven pairs of glasses sold in the U.S.
Today, stockpiles of silver are tighter than for any/every other widely-used metal, yet it's suppressed/manipulated price makes it the most-undervalued commodity on the planet – even in comparison to gold.
At Bullion Bulls Canada, we really like gold, but we LOVE silver. For more reasons why this is so, see also:
The Silver-lining of "Gold Fever"
Gold and Silver: a Story of the Sun and the Moon
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Not to mention the fact that when a given carat of gold lower than 24k is used (say 22k or 18k), some of the other carats are often silver. If the price of gold is high enough that 18k is too high, but 14k is still affordable, then the six or ten carats (the extra %, really) should at least partially be silver. This is currently seen in cases where lower-income or lower-credit-score individuals wish to appear to be more prosperous -- when purer gold is too expensive to be obtainable (i.e., urban USA). I don't think people around the world will actually *stop* wearing gold jewelry, but if the gold is less gold and more silver, then that's all good for silver!
As for whether wearing "yellow metal" jewelry will be replaced by "white metal" jewelry, that's a matter of an individual woman's taste and sense of fashion. Jewelry doesn't have to be pure silver or even look like pure silver in order to see a substantial increase in the use of silver for jewelry.