Silver Is $40/oz and Going Up... It's Time To Move Beyond Thrifting

The False Economy of Thrifting Silver

Silver has broken through the $40/oz ceiling.  This is not little news, especially for printed electronics OEMs, contract manufacturers, and ultimately global consumers.

For almost two decades, printed electronics manufacturers have focused on silver as the basis of conductive inks. However, silver metal—the industry’s first viable feedstock material — is a risky investment, with volatile cost and shrinking supply chains. The response has been to follow the hard tech’s world of incremental thrift by shaving a micron here, a square centimeter there, or swap in a carbon overcoat to stretch a gram of silver further.

Those engineering tricks have bought time and allowed industry to further leverage their sunk costs. But time is up.

Copper inks are no longer a laboratory curiosity. They are production-ready, cost-stable, and designed to slot into existing roll-to-roll and screen-printing processes. As silver spikes past $40/oz for only the third time in a century, tariffs disrupt the global copper trade, and copper mines are closing, manufacturers are at a crossroads.

The question is no longer whether you can find one more optimization. The question is “why do you keep trying”. They don’t solve the underlying fundamental problems: silver is expensive, volatile, and supply-constrained. The real solution isn’t to use less silver—it’s to get off silver altogether.

The Silver Dilemma

Silver is the best electrical conductor on Earth (copper is a close 2^nd). This, along with copper’s challenge with oxidation, made silver the initial workhorse of printed electronics. Antennas for RFID, membrane switches, automotive sensors, flexible displays, medical electrodes—if it needed conductivity in a thin printed film, silver was the default.

It can be tempting to use one metric to define an issue, but conductivity is not the only property that matters. Cost and supply matter just as much. Silver’s price history is volatile: in the last five years alone, it has swung from the mid-$20s to $40 per ounce. In the ten years prior to that, silver was as low as $11/oz  to as high as $49/oz.

The demand side is only getting tighter. Industrial silver consumption hit record highs in 2024, led by photovoltaics, EVs, and 5G infrastructure. Electronics alone absorb more than a third of global silver supply.  Every new gigawatt of solar capacity, every million electric vehicles, competes for the same pool of silver flakes that RFID makers rely on. No amount of thrifting changes that or the underlying structural market issues. Adding unpredictable cents to every tag or sensor at industrial volumes, the unpredictability translates to millions of dollars in unplanned material costs per manufacturing run.

The Thrifting Playbook—and Its Limits

Industrial engineers and contract manufacturers have deployed a wide toolkit to stretch silver inks:

• Geometry optimization: printing antennas and traces with hollow structures or meshes instead of solid fills.

• Film thinning: pushing thickness down from 10 µm to 2–3 µm with better process control.

• Hybrid inks: blending carbon or polymers with silver flakes to reduce loading.

• Nanowires and silver-coated copper particles: alternative morphologies that cut the grams-per-tag cost.

• Overcoats and encapsulants: carbon or polymer layers to suppress silver migration, allowing thinner silver beneath.

These tactics have merit. They extend silver’s lifespan in cost-sensitive designs and delay catastrophic bill-of-material increases. But they are inherently incremental with ever smaller returns. You’re still buying silver, still tied to its price swings, and still competing against solar and automotive giants for supply.

There’s also a dimension of technical risk in incremental hacks. Each time you shave down film thickness or tweak geometry, you inch closer to reliability limits: higher resistances, narrower margins, greater sensitivity to humidity and migration. For products with tight regulatory or performance specs, that’s an expensive risk to manage.

Granted, these incremental modifications have helped manage the cost of using silver over time. But they do little to impact the value of the end products or offer significant product differentiation, while requiring significant technical and operational investment. Time and money that can be used to facilitate a switch to copper conductive inks and avoid being trapped with the ever-increasing supply chain and cost challenges of silver.

Copper: Equivalent Performance, Structural Advantage

Copper is nearly as conductive as silver, about 95% on a bulk basis, and the second most conductive metal in the Earth’s crust. It is 1000 times more abundant and about 100 times cheaper per unit mass. While its price is higher today than five years ago, it remains anchored by scale and abundance of reserves.

Until recent innovations the challenge has been oxidation. Copper inks want to form oxides at modest temperatures and humidity, which makes it tricky to print and cure into reliable films. But advances in nanoparticle synthesis, ink formulation, and curing technology have resolved that barrier. Photonic curing, plasma sintering, and low-temperature reductive chemistries let copper inks form dense, conductive networks.

In practice, copper inks can be printed with the same screen meshes, gravure cylinders, or inkjet heads used for silver. Curing times are compatible with roll-to-roll speeds. And importantly, they deliver conductivity sufficient for antennas, heaters, sensors, and interconnects— at a fraction of silver’s material cost.

The cost delta from this switch? Enormous. That same 100 million-unit RFID run that eats $1.6 million in silver at $40/oz? With copper inks, you’re down around $10,000–15,000 in raw metal. That’s not an efficiency tweak. That’s a different business model.

From Incremental to Transformational

The last decade of silver-thrifting innovation extended the utility of silver inks and kept billions of devices affordable. But it is at best a holding pattern. The true structural fix is to move to copper inks: equivalent performance, orders-of-magnitude lower material cost, less volatility, better reliability, and stronger sustainability.

OEMs and contract manufacturers face a choice. They can keep playing the thrift game, shaving milligrams and microns of silver, hoping the next price spike doesn’t blow up their margins. Or they can make the transition to copper, capture immediate savings, and position themselves as leaders in a market that cannot keep leaning on silver forever.

The inflection point is here. Silver at $40/oz underscores the fragility of the old model. Copper inks are ready, proven, and waiting. The manufacturers who switch first won’t just save money—they’ll own the narrative of reliability and sustainability in printed electronics.

Cost, Risk, and Story

Switching now is not about saving a cent per tag. It’s about risk. Customers, investors, and supply chain managers don’t like surprises, and silver is full of surprises.

Copper gives you predictability. It gives you scale. And, ultimately, it gives you a better story. Imagine pitching a major OEM and telling them: we’ve cut raw materials volatility out of the picture, our process is greener, and the economics are stable across tens of millions of units. That’s a stronger position than “we found a way to print thinner lines.”

The Real Choice

So the choice isn’t between “silver at 2 microns” and “silver at 1.5 microns.” The choice is whether you keep burning cash and design hours shaving silver, or whether you step into a material that actually scales with the industry.

Silver thrift has been the stopgap. Copper inks are the solution. One is reactive, the other is proactive. One delays the problem, the other ends it.

The market is giving a loud signal—$40/oz silver is not a fluke, it’s a flashing red light. The smart move isn’t to run faster on the treadmill. It’s to get off the treadmill altogether.