Silver is sometimes found as free metal and also in many minerals. However, it actually makes up on only a tiny proportion of the earth's crust. In fact there is less than a gram of it in 20 tons of rock. We can extract silver from silver ores, and the most important silver ore is asanthite or argentite. Lead sulphate or Galena is another important source of silver.
Extracting silver is a complex process and about 18,000 tones of silver is produced every year. A lot of it comes from the wastes left behind after refining copper, lead or zinc. The principal sources of silver are the ores of copper, coppernickle, lead and lead-zinc obtained from Peru, Mexico, China, Autralia, Chile, Poland and Kosovo. Peru and Mexico have been mining silver since 1546 and are still major world producers of this lustrous metal. Although silver is relatively scarce it is the most plentiful and least expensive of the precious metal.
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