ethical issues in the jewellery industry

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/mining/9493455/Marikana-massacre-proves-platinum-jewellery-comes-at-an-increasingly-heavy-price.html

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