Avoiding Dirty Gold?
Basically the way the gold supply works is that every jeweller in the UK recycles their offcuts and scraps from making back into the big pot of gold at the refinery. The refiners work on a large scale so gold from new mining, gold from jewellers' workbenches and gold from old pieces of jewellery are all melted up together and made into new sheets and bars which we then buy as we need them when people commission rings. Refining is a large scale process and something that is difficult to do on an individual basis in the workshop.
This means that you can't know where the gold has come from and definitively whether it has been mined in an ethically sound way or not. We are pursuing a two-pronged attack. As founder members of the Council for Ethical Jewellery Practices we are putting pressure on the commercial mines to clean up their act, and use the collective buying power of the UK jewellery industry to force change to happen. We are also spending time lobbying our metal suppliers to start making available a tracked source of supply - in practice this would mean having one vat every so often that is certified ethically sourced. It will mean a lot more work for them, and will be more expensive than the regular kind of untraceable gold, but as soon as certified gold is available in the regular supply chain it will be easy for everyone to offer this as an option.
We are pleased to be one of the first twenty companies able to offer fully certified Fairtrade and Fairmined Gold. It comes from local collectives and artisan miners, mainly in South America, and being mined on a small scale by hand it doesn't have the impact on the local environment. Companies licenced to use Fairtrade Gold will be able to get their jewellery marked with the special Fairtrade mark alongside the normal hallmark available from the UK Assay Office.
There is a third way, which is reusing old gold - family jewellery can be melted down in the workshop and made into a new piece - see reusing metal for details of this. This isn't a perfect process, but it does mean that no more mining has to take place.
Related blog articles
- Sophie is conducting a poll on fair trade gold. See her blog on this topic.
