Along the Ugly Path to Beautiful Jewellery

Mining precious metals and stones can often have devastating human, environmental and political impact. What’s being done about it?

LONDON, United Kingdom — “Producing one single gold ring can generate up to 20 tonnes of mine waste, with mercury and cyanide going into the water system,” explains New York-based jeweller Monique Péan, who, several years ago, became horrified by the destructive impact of her industry. “The more I learned, the more frightened I was about how I’d be able to proceed and create beautiful things that spoke to the same sense of quality and craftsmanship as other luxury players and still be able to stand behind the pieces that I was producing.”

Péan is one of a new generation of fashionable fine jewellers who are increasingly building ethical and environmental concerns into their businesses. Each one of Péan’s pieces – which blend references to ancient culture with modern, architectural sensibilities — is now environmentally friendly and sustainable. She uses a combination of recycled gemstones and those obtained from artisan mining companies and larger, environmentally responsible mines.

“It’s exciting to see that more designers are becoming interested and the consumer landscape is changing globally,” says Péan. But while several small, independent operations like Péan’s have embraced ethical jewellery, the situation is much murkier across the wider industry.

Around the year 2000, the term ‘blood diamond’ became hauntingly familiar to the wider public, first through news reports and, later, as the title of a movie starring Leonardo Dicaprio that depicted the human cost of the diamond trade in Sierra Leone. The film’s epilogue dramatised the industry’s first steps toward developing a ‘conflict-free’ classification for rough diamonds, now widely adopted by reputable jewellers.

For consumers interested in the ethical integrity of their jewellery, however, the story does not end there. Alongside rising concerns about the environmental damage, human rights abuses and dangerous labour practices associated with mining precious metals and stones, the validity of ‘conflict-free’ diamonds has come into question.

In December of 1998, the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Global Witness published a report entitled A Rough Trade on the role diamonds had played in the devastating civil war in Angola. During a period in which over 500,000 lives had been lost, the war effort of the opposition party had been funded by $3.7 billion in diamond sales. A Rough Trade stimulated the creation of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme in 2002, to which 81 countries — representing 99.8 percent of the global production of rough diamonds — signed on. At the time, the Kimberley Process was seen as a hard-won triumph, an effective response to the destructive practises that had bloodied the diamond industry’s reputation.

However, in 2011, Global Witness, the organisation that had been so instrumental in its creation, left the Kimberley Process, stating: “Despite the existence of the Kimberley Process, diamonds are still fuelling violence and human rights abuses. The Kimberley Process’ refusal to evolve and address the clear links between diamonds, violence and tyranny has rendered it increasingly outdated.” Despite this, the Kimberley Process still remains the jewellery industry’s standard.

There is currently no single universal certification scheme that can provide full reassurance that the jewellery you buy is ethical, though some retailers have taken matters into their own hands. Several jewellers, such as the online retailer Blue Nile, have made a point of going beyond the Kimberley Process by examining abuse reports from specific areas and vetting sources of stones on an individual basis. Along with Boucheron, Cartier, Piaget and Tiffany, Blue Nile is also one of 100 signatories of the ‘Golden Rules’ against dangerous and destructive gold mining practices laid out by environmental organisation Earthworks.

The venerable Swiss jewellery house Chopard launched its first Green Carpet Collection (a response to Livia Firth’s Green Carpet Challenge) in 2013 with earrings and a fairly mined gold bracelet set embedded with conflict-free diamonds. Actress Marion Cotillard wore the set on the red carpet at Cannes. While it represents a tiny fraction of Chopard’s output, the house sees the collection as the start of a larger company-wide journey towards what it calls sustainable luxury. The gold for these pieces was mined from small communities in South America that, together with the NGO Alliance for Responsible Mining, Chopard supported and helped to reach Fairmined certification.