The problem with gold mining
The gold needed to make one ring is acquired by the displacement of
around 20 tonnes of earth; this is then extracted using toxic chemicals.
The jewellery industry uses 85% of all newly mined gold......
Platinum
Most platinum comes from South Africa, the United States, Russia,
South America and Canada, with South Africa and Russia producing some
60% of the total. (It’s estimated that 90% of the world’s remaining
supplies are in South Africa.)
Like Gold & silver, platinum is a dwindling resource — and is
even more difficult to recover (hence its higher price). It’s actually
more plentiful in the Earth’s crust than the other two precious metals,
but production volumes are only around 10% of those of Gold & around
1% of silver volumes.
There are three factors that make platinum hard to recover:
- The depth of deposits (for example, the Merensky Reef is South Africa is nearly 1.5km below ground)
- Low concentration — most platinum metals are in fine granular form,
widely dispersed in the ore (on average around 2 to 3 tonnes of ore must
be processed to recover enough platinum for one wedding ring); and
- Chemical bonding with other platinum group metals. Less than half of
all platinum group metals mined wind up as true platinum — and it can
take five times longer than gold to extract.
On the socio-political side, South Africa is the main ‘hot bed’.
Some publications report widespread dislocation and oppression of
local populations, including imprisonment of dissident leaders, violent
quelling of protests, destruction of crops and intentional polluting of
community water supplies.
On the other hand, other publications (like The Times) report a
beneficial local economic boom — job creation, infrastructure
development, real estate value increases and the like.
Either way, unlike Gold & silver, platinum has significant uses
outside of jewellery (it’s an irreplaceable component in car exhaust
systems for example) — so the jewellery industry is not the major
production driver.
When it comes to ‘dirty’ Gold & silver, unfortunately there is
almost no public awareness of the issue in Australia. Even inside the
industry, very few jewellers are aware of the damage conventional mining
of Gold & silver does to the environment.
Ethical Jewellery Australia Pty Ltd grew from the desire to do
something about changing the status quo. As EJA’s position is to reduce
the impact the jewellery industry has on the environment and its
people, we only use recycled Gold & platinum. We source all of our
metal from responsible recyclers, as we don’t want to obtain ethical
metals at the expense of environmentally destructive recycling methods.
.http://www.ethicaljewels.com.au/about/eja-philosophy
http://www.brilliantearth.com/jewelry-issues/
http://www.madisondialogue.org/Clear_Conscience_Jewelry.pdf
http://www.cibjo.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=377%3Aindustry-needs-to-prepare-groundwork-for-ethical-sourcing-says-aenc-president&catid=37%3Acibjo-news-update-september-12-2011&Itemid=40
http://www.ezilon.com/articles/articles/8892/1/The-Ethical-Challenges-Facing-The-Jewellery-Industry
http://www.ethicaljewels.com.au/about/eja-philosophy
http://shirahime.ch/2011/01/ethics-in-the-21st-century-diamond-jewelry-industry-iiiii-the-kimberley-process-and-beyond/
http://shirahime.ch/2011/01/ethics-in-the-21st-century-diamond-jewelry-industry-iiiii-the-kimberley-process-and-beyond/
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches/episode-guide/series-94/episode-1
http://www.kimberleyprocess.com/
http://thegreenerdiamond.org/pages/about-conflict-diamonds/kimberley-process.php
http://fariedanazier.blogspot.com/2010/10/sustainability-and-gold-jewellery.html
http://www.freearticles.co.za/business/ethics/there-such-thing-fair-trade-jewelry.html
http://www.nri.org/projects/nret/ethicaljewellery.pdf
