Laibach's Principle on Recycled Precious Metals and Comment on Media Reports

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This page describes Atelier Laibach's opinion on the influence of greenwashing emanating from the jewellery industry.

To remind customers of one of the main principles of Laibach's pioneering ethos in jewellery creation:
Kerstin Laibach uses only recycled precious metals and not new-mined.

For ethical, economic and secure reasons, Laibach does not stock gold and acquires from the recycling refiner only the amount necessary for an individual piece or bespoke order.

What is the difference between recycled gold and new-mined gold?

Absolutely nothing. Gold is gold, whether it is directly fresh-mined or old / used gold that has been endlessly recycled (refined).
For example, rainwater is rainwater; however many times it evaporates from a puddle, turns into a cloud and rains down again it's always pure rainwater.
So, recycled pure gold is identical to fresh-mined pure gold when it ends up in your jewellery.
The closest you can get to calling a form of gold "ethical" or "environmentally friendly" is recycled gold. Even then, it's the action of recycling which is ethical ... not the gold itself.
However, recycled gold is the only sound choice for the environmentally conscious jewellery buyer. There is also no difference between new-mined platinum, new mined silver and their recycled counterparts.

The word "recycled" can have negative connotations to some jewellery customers who may think the quality of recycled gold made into jewellery is inferior to fresh-mined gold. This is not the case at all as the information above explains.

Greenwashing the Gold Rush
(excerpt from Looking-Glass)

Ethical jewellery craft should, you would think, be defined by the responsible use of recycled precious metals, which clearly means sustainable, and not by promoting the continual extraction of raw materials and the subsequent environmental disruption it causes.

To describe any form of new-mined gold in jewellery as ethical and green is contradictory and misleading, and perhaps the most blatant example of greenwashing to date.

Gold mining by nature is not an environmentally sustainable practice and therefore not ecologically ethical. This also applies to "fair-trade or "fair-mined" gold which is mined and therefore should also not be termed as "green" either. Mining disrupts and destroys essential life-sustaining, interdependent ecosystems by displacing previously untouched environments containing fragile flora and fauna, right down to the micro-biological level. Mining is detrimental to the ecology of our planet, and there is no form of raw extraction for the jewellery industry that can genuinely claim to the contrary.
As from 2011, Fair-trade's new undertaking has increased the demand for mined gold as many "ethical" jewellers (and even standard jewellers), who were originally only sourcing ecologically-sustainable recycled gold have jumped on the lucrative fair-trade bandwagon and are now clamoring for Fair-mined gold instead. (The surge in demand for such gold is considerably more than what is available.) Subsequently, the amount of gold that is mined is set to rise dramatically ... a major drawback for earth's ecology and for those environmental organisations whose aim is to protect it.

To summarize:
Recycling gold is an environmentally friendly practice. It can comfortably be termed as an ethical process because disruption to our fragile, natural environments has effectively been eliminated from the procedure of refining pure gold for use in the jewellery industry. It is sustainable.
Mining gold is a practice which destroys or displaces the long-established natural ecology of the areas where it is extracted, and therefore offers no environmental benefit.

(excerpt re-printed with permission from Looking-Glass ... New Ethical Horizons)

Intitial Response to the UK Channel 4 Documentary "Dispatches... The Real Price of Gold".

Laibach Atelier felt the general context of the programme was well balanced. We were pleased to note that (for once) any "trend" biasing towards Fairtrade and their excursion into the gold industry was not apparent and subsequently put more in context within the general picture regarding the overall impact of gold-mining. This meant the programme more clearly defined points of what consumers might understand about the positives and negatives of the gold supply to the jewellery industry. However, one fatal error regarding the availability of recycled gold knocked sideways the public's understanding of what they might find as as the crucial ethical choice in their jewellery shop. The programme said that recycled gold was scarce and not easily available. This could not be further from the truth and it is most odd why the programme suggested otherwise; we can only imagine that Dispatches programme researchers were misinformed from an external source. We hope that Channel 4 will notify viewers of this mistake sometime in the near future. Recycled gold is readily available from many refiners. In fact, refiners have more recycled gold available than ever because so much old gold has been sold by the public to gold buyers which is then sent to refiners, many of who only refine post consumer gold, teeth fillings etc. Laibach's own refiner even states that they are buying in more old gold than they are selling. The Channel 4 forum page has subsequently been full of comments believing that recycled gold is not readily available. One comment wrongly claimed that recycling gold was highly polluting and then went on to (bizarrely) suggest that jewellers should mine their own gold. Recycling refiners, by law, have to maintain a strict code of control on any emissions created from the refining process. The truth is that reputable refiners are now so technically advanced in safely processing precious metals, that any form of emissions that may be produced are negligible, and absolutely nothing in comparison to the devastation created by mining. In fact, to be passed as approx 99.99% pure (24ct) and thereafter hallmarked for use as bullion or for the jewllery industry, all gold ... old and new-mined gold has to be refined to certify its purity ... including fairtrade mined gold.
See What is the difference between recycled gold and new-mined gold?