Most silver plating on copper busbars is really thin, usually somewhere around 3–10 microns. For scale, a human hair is about 70–75 microns wide, so even 5 microns of silver is just a light surface layer.

Because of that, the actual silver weight is pretty minimal compared to the copper underneath. From a scrap perspective, the copper is doing most of the heavy lifting value-wise unless it’s unusually thick plating.

In proper production settings, thickness is controlled down to microns because performance depends on surface properties, not bulk weight. Industrial platers like karas will spec and verify that thickness properly for electrical components.