Why choose Fairmined gold over recycled gold?
How to choose better sources of gold
Making any changes to your supply chain when you make jewelry comes with a series of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style options. If you decide to change the materials you use, your story changes - different materials can change your pricing, your tools, your process, and your marketing.
When it comes to metals, the best option for designers who wanted to make responsible jewelry used to be recycled gold. For decades it was pretty much the only option if you wanted to source responsibly.
And while recycling gold isn’t “bad” as a gold option, now that other, more traceable gold exists, and now that better mining practices exist, we can turn our attention to supporting such important initiatives.
Why choose Fairmined gold for your jewelry?
Enter Fairmined gold - when Fairmined gold first became an option, I looked into using it, but the cost was high, the supply was limited, and there was a research and licensing process that came along with it that I thought was intimidating. At the time, I knew that I wanted to incorporate this material into my work, but there were so many considerations to make before I did.
How would I communicate about it?
Would customers follow me?
Did I have the budget to even start the process of buying Fairmined gold?
And could I incorporate it into what I was already making? Or would it bring about changes?
Let’s start with the most essential question:
What is Fairmined Gold?
At its heart, Fairmined gold is one way to improve economic and environmental conditions in mining communities around the world.
Gold mines that are certified as Fairmined create better pay for their miners, safer working conditions for miners, more schools and development in mining communities, and also aim to reduce the amount of mercury produced by gold mining, and eventually eliminate the use of mercury completely.
This is done cooperatively within the mining community, or in partnership with local control.
At this point, you might be wondering why it hasn't caught on everywhere yet, and if you have explored using Fairmined, then you likely already know the answer.
Why does Fairmined gold cost more?
The only downside of using Fairmined gold is the cost—the higher cost of Fairmined gold is significant. Sometimes the same 18-karat gold wire in Fairmined gold can cost up to 20% more than 18-karat recycled gold wire. For a lot of us designers and metalsmiths, this is a difficult cost to pass along to our customers.
However, Fairmined gold gives us a picture of what gold SHOULD cost, and that cost is, for the time being, higher than regular mined gold or recycled gold.
If we were really ready to pay the true economic cost of gold mining, then all gold should be at this price. Better yet, we could try turning more small-scale gold mines into Fairmined gold mines.
Is Recycled gold a bad choice for jewelry?
In short, it isn’t a bad choice, but it isn’t the answer to either curtailing gold mining nor is it the answer to making the mining process fairer.
Recycled gold is a default choice. As jewelers, we all recycle gold in some way. I recycle gold at my bench by melting old scrap down and reforming it. Recycling of gold has been done since the discovery of gold - it is simply too precious to waste and so easy to reuse. In fact, since the beginning of gold mining thousands of years ago, it is estimated that only 2-3% of mined gold has been lost or wasted.
That same preciousness and high cost also make it very profitable to mine, which is why recycling on its own won’t stop gold mining.
Recycling gold is merely one small part of creating better sustainability practices, but on its own, it is not enough. We need to reduce our demands on gold mining and create better and safer mining practices.
We need to reduce our obsession with replacing our electronics every time a new product is released. Every iPhone has gold in it. Do you really need the new version every two years?
We also need to acknowledge that with so much gold above ground simply sitting in storage (hellooooo Fort Knox!), we have lots of gold already. Some of it might even be sitting unused in your jewelry box.
Because the downside of recycled gold is that it does very little to encourage more responsible mining practices. I still use recycled gold, however, until better choices are created.
Here is a short list of resources that I used to learn about Fairmined and recycled gold:
Fairmined.org - I went through the process of becoming certified to use Fairmined gold. I found that it was really helpful to call and email this organization to get guidance on the process. You can still purchase and use Fairmined gold without getting certified, but with the certification, you are also required to implement your own internal tracking and weighing systems to track it separately from other metals.
Living Room Sessions with Christina Miller - This session, in particular, was really helpful
Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM) - does incredible work with mining communities and offer some reading resources
Have questions? Post them in the comments!
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