Ethical Precious Metals

Gold

The way the gold supply chain works is that every jeweller in the UK recycles their offcuts and scraps from their workshop back into a big pot in the refinery. The refiners work on a large scale so gold from new mining, gold from jeweller's work benches and old pieces of gold jewellery are all melted up together and made into new sheets and bars. This is what we use as a starting point for our bespoke jewellery.

This means that a customer cannot know where their gold has come from and definitively whether it has been mined in an ethically sound way or not. So we are pursuing a two-pronged attack to tackle this:

• As the first independent UK Jewellers to have achieved full Responsible Jewellery Council Certification we are putting pressure on the commercial mines to clean up their act, and use the collective buying power of the UK jewellery industry, through this organisaiont, to force change to happen. We are also spending time lobbying our metal supplilers to start making available a tracked source of supply - in practice this mean having one vat every so often that is certificced ethically sourced.
• Concurrently we were one of the first twenty worldwide jewellers to launch full certified Fairtrade and Fairmined gold with the Fairtrade Foundation as an option to our customers for their bespoke jewellery. The work in this area is continuing to make certfied Fairtrade gold more freely available.

Another option to customers is to consider reusing old gold - family jewellery can be melted down here in our workshop and made into a new piece. This isn't a perfect process - its difficult to avoild tiny bubbles and you never get as much gold as you expect. It is also more expensive than getting gold from the refiners because of the time involved but it does mean that no new mining has taken place in the creation of the new piece of jewellery.

Platinum

Platinum is a beautiful metal but quite energy intensive to get out of the ground and very rare. There is an often-quoted statistic that says that if all the platinum was melted down and put into an olympic-sized swimming pool it wouldn't cover your ankles.

The jewellery industry isn't the main reason for platinum mining - there are two places in which platinum is irreplaceable by any other metal and they in the medical industry (for the production of drugs) and in catalytic converters which make the world a cleaner place anyway. We piggyback on the back of that with the platinum we use for jewellery.

It is often possible to reuse heirloom platinum jewellery although unlike gold jewellery we can't just melt it down and reuse it in the workshop - it just doesn't work so well as gold. What we can do is reuse it in the same form, so for example an old platinum wedding ring could be become the shank for a new ring. If this is something you're thinking about them its best to get advice early on from one of our designers.

Silver

Compared to the other metals, silver generally doesn't take much energy to mine and refine. As much as 75% of the world's silver production comes as a by-product from mining gold, copper, lead and zinc.

Palladium

Palladium is a relatively new precious metal in jewellery terms - it has recently been given its own UK hallmark. It has the same bright white colour as platinum and like platinum is not mined specifically for jewellery. Actually palladium is a by-product of platinum mining.

Rhodium Plating

Rhodium plating can be applied to the surface of a white gold ring or piece of jewellery to give it an extra white colour. We offer this choice (most high street shops just apply it without asking!). It is worth bearing in mind that the solution used in this plating process is rather harmful to the environment and the natural colour of white gold is a lovely warm white colour and doesn't actually need this plating at all.

Related Ethical Articles

• Read Harriet's article entitled 6 reasons to buy certified Fairtrade Gold