Why Does Their Use Recycled Gold?
Movies and TV have made gold mining look like winning the lottery. Finding gold is hard, but once you find it, it is easy. In popular culture gold sits in purified nuggets and veins, waiting to be plucked out of the earth.
In reality, finding gold is only the beginning, and extracting it is the hard part. Most gold ore holds less than 10 grams of gold in a tonne of rock. To get that gold out, miners use some of the most toxic chemicals on the planet: cyanide and mercury. The result is staggering amounts of toxic waste. Open pit mining and cyanide heap leaching generate around 20 tons of toxic waste to produce enough gold for a single ring. The world's 10 to 15 million small scale miners release about 1,000 tonnes of mercury into the environment every year, roughly 35% of all man made mercury pollution.
If you have ever wondered why we worry about mercury in the fish we eat, gold mining is a large part of the answer.
Gold is a limited resource, so we chose to make our jewelry from recycled gold rather than newly mined gold. Recycled gold comes from existing jewelry, industrial metals and electronic components, refined back to its purest form. It is equal in quality to newly mined metal, and it involves far fewer chemicals and far less destruction to get there.
None of this started as a business decision. As Co-Founder and CEO, I have always tried to live mindfully, and it has become clearer every year that what we buy shapes what gets made. Rather than looking at the whole picture, which gets daunting fast, we make small shifts in how we live and how we run the company. Transparency, sustainability and doing some good sit at the front of everything here.
Their has used recycled gold and silver in every piece since day one. By using the materials already above ground, we can make jewelry worth keeping without taking more from the ground to do it.
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