Platinum Group Metal Refiners: Accredited PGM Refiners Worldwide

What Is an Accredited PGM Refiner?#

An accredited PGM refiner is one listed on the LPPM Good Delivery List or the LPPM Sponge Accreditation lists, the only formal quality standards that reach platinum, palladium and, for sponge only, rhodium. No such list exists for iridium, ruthenium or osmium, a gap covered under Rhodium Sponge Accreditation, below. Accreditation is a claim about assaying ability and financial standing, not about mining or ownership: a refiner earns a place on the list by proving it can deliver metal of a stated fineness, consistently, to a standard the market accepts without re-testing.

That distinction matters most to anyone selling material rather than buying it. A seller working through catalytic-converter scrap, spent catalyst or old jewelry deals with a toll refiner or buyer, not directly with the Good Delivery list, and the process for that route is covered separately under scrap platinum group metals. The sections below cover the standard itself, first.

LPPM Good Delivery: The Wholesale Accreditation Standard#

The LPPM Good Delivery standard, administered by the London Platinum and Palladium Market (founded 1987), sets a minimum fineness of 99.95% (three nines five) for platinum and palladium plates and ingots of 1 to 6 kilograms (32.151 to 192.904 troy ounces), settled on the joint London/Zurich list. A bar meeting that standard is accepted by approved vault operators without further testing, turning metal from any of 39 refiners into one fungible instrument.

The rule runs both ways. A refiner's Good Delivery status is provisional on the vault manager's acceptance of each bar, not a permanent certificate, and any bar that fails inspection is rejected and returned to the refiner that produced it. Good Delivery status therefore describes an ongoing testing relationship, re-verified through Proactive Monitoring, not a one-time award.

How a Refiner Becomes LPPM-Accredited#

A refiner becomes LPPM-accredited by meeting five application thresholds and passing referee testing on submitted sample bars, per the LPPM Good Delivery Rules (June 2020 edition). Applicants must show at least 5 years of overall operating history and 3 years of refining experience, at least 500 kilograms a year of refined platinum or palladium production over those 3 years, a tangible net worth of at least £15 million, and a responsible-sourcing audit by an LPPM-approved provider under the LPPM Responsible Sourcing Guidance (Version 5.1, 14 July 2026).

Passing the thresholds only opens testing, which runs in four stages:

1. Submit the application on the LPPM's standard form, with supporting documentation of the thresholds above.
2. Pay the non-refundable £2,000 application fee and £18,000 Stage 1 testing fee, per metal.
3. Deliver three sample plates or ingots to a nominated vault within four weeks of application.
4. Match the applicant's own five-figure assay determination, never below 99.950%, against the result returned by referees whose identities stay undisclosed to the applicant.

Independent referees run spectrographic PGM assay on those submitted plates and ingots. Once listed, a refiner re-enters that same check under Proactive Monitoring roughly every three years, so accreditation is a standard it keeps meeting, not a badge earned once.

Good Delivery Refiners by Country#

The LPPM Good Delivery List names 39 platinum refiners and 33 palladium refiners, as retrieved 6 August 2026, with Japan holding more listed platinum refiners than any other country, nine in total. The palladium list is the platinum list minus exactly six entities, most notably Impala Platinum Limited, which is Good Delivery accredited for platinum plates but not for palladium ones. A separate sponge standard adds refiners the plate list never counts, and rhodium carries the only accreditation of its kind for a minor PGM.

Japan's nine platinum refiners, Aida Chemical Industries, ASAHI METALFINE, Furuya Metal, Ishifuku Metal Industry, Matsuda Sangyo, Nihon Material, Onahama Smelting and Refining, TANAKA Precious Metal Technologies and Tokuriki Honten, reflect the country's electronics and jewelry fabrication base. China holds seven listed platinum refiners, though only three also carry palladium accreditation. China and the platinum market covers the demand side of that same growth. Switzerland holds four platinum refiners and Germany three, while only three entries on the entire list, Rustenburg Platinum Mines, Impala Platinum and Western Platinum, are mining-company refineries rather than toll or secondary refiners.

Platinum and Palladium Sponge Accreditation#

Platinum sponge accreditation, a separate LPPM standard from Good Delivery, lists 31 refiners, adding names such as Umicore S.A. and Johnson Matthey's Zhangjiagang plant that are absent from the platinum bar list. Sponge is porous metal produced by hydrogen reduction of a precipitated PGM salt, the standard commercial-purity form (minimum 99.95%) sold to catalyst makers and other fabricators rather than to bullion vaults, and the palladium sponge list carries the same 31-refiner roster.

A refiner reaches the sponge list by a route open specifically to companies that never sought Good Delivery status: Umicore, for example, describes its own PGM output as sponge and powder, not plates, so it applies for sponge accreditation only and never appears on the bar lists at all. Fabricators and catalyst manufacturers buying sponge from an accredited name can request current terms from PGM product suppliers listed elsewhere on this site.

Rhodium Sponge Accreditation: The Only Minor-PGM Standard#

Rhodium is the only minor PGM with its own LPPM accreditation list, because it has no futures contract, no Good Delivery bar and no benchmark fixing; iridium, ruthenium and osmium have neither an LPPM list nor an exchange contract of any kind. That absence of a price benchmark is exactly why the rhodium sponge list matters commercially: it is the closest thing the rhodium market has to a quality standard, and the named roster functions as the list of counterparties whose rhodium is accepted without re-assay.

Nineteen refiners are enumerable by name on the current rhodium sponge list, including BASF Metals, Heraeus Precious Metals, Johnson Matthey, Tanaka, Umicore S.A. and Valcambi, though LPPM's own page states a total of 20. DailyPlatinum cites the names rather than publishing either number as a settled count until that discrepancy is resolved against the live page. Rules for rhodium sponge accreditation are published as a document separate from the platinum and palladium rules, under the LPPM Sponge Accreditation section.

Accredited PGM Refiners Directory#

DailyPlatinum profiles 12 accredited PGM refiners, each with its accreditation status as recorded on the LPPM lists above, its home country and its products and services. The table lists Good Delivery status, sponge status, or that a refiner holds neither.

Two entries break the pattern a directory would otherwise gloss over. Rand Refinery, despite its name recognition, is not LPPM-accredited for platinum or palladium at all; it is a gold and silver refiner whose smelter recovers Pt and Pd only as by-products, and its own customer guidance directs PGM refining enquiries to Impala Refining Services. Krastsvetmet, Russia's only refinery producing all eight precious metals including platinum and palladium, was suspended from both the Good Delivery and Sponge Accreditation lists by the LPPM Management Committee on 8 April 2022, citing the war in Ukraine; metal it produced before that date remains Good Delivery, but nothing produced since counts.

Refiners vs Refining Services#

This directory covers which refiners are accredited, a wholesale question about whether a bar or sponge lot is fungible on the London and Zurich market. How precious metal refining works, chemically, and how to choose a refiner for scrap material sit on separate pages, because a scrap seller asks a different question: which refiner pays fairly on assayed content, on what timeline and at what treatment charge.

Those two questions rarely have the same answer. A refiner can run a highly capable toll-refining operation for catalytic converters and spent catalyst without ever holding LPPM accreditation, since accreditation targets wholesale bar and sponge production, not scrap intake volume. A scrap seller weighs different variables than a bar buyer does, among them:

• Payout basis: outright purchase at an agreed reference price, or toll refining that returns metal after an accountability period.
• Treatment and refining charges: deducted from the assayed content before payment.
• Turnaround time: the pipeline from intake to settled metal, which varies far more between refiners than accreditation status does.
• Accreditation status: relevant to wholesale bar and sponge liquidity, not to whether a refiner can process scrap competently.

Anyone sourcing PGM-bearing scrap, rather than buying accredited bullion, should read how to choose a PGM refiner before selecting a counterparty, since accreditation status alone does not settle that choice.

PGM Refiner FAQ#

How many LPPM-accredited platinum refiners are there?#

LPPM lists 39 accredited platinum refiners and 33 accredited palladium refiners, as retrieved 6 August 2026. The palladium list is the platinum list minus six named entities, so every palladium-accredited refiner is also platinum-accredited, but not the reverse.

Which country has the most LPPM-listed platinum refiners?#

Japan has nine LPPM-listed platinum refiners, more than any other country, reflecting its electronics and jewelry fabrication base. China holds seven, Switzerland four and Germany three, with the remaining refiners spread across single-digit counts by country.

Do iridium, ruthenium and osmium have an accreditation standard?#

No. Iridium, ruthenium and osmium have neither LPPM accreditation nor an exchange contract of any kind. Rhodium sponge accreditation, covered above, is the only minor-PGM standard on the market, and no equivalent exists for the other three.