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Redesign, Recycle, Repair, Reclaim...
Laibach's Ten Year / Pre-Millennium Threshold Principle ... Working with old Jewellery

At Atelier Laibach, we feel that a piece of jewellery should have undergone some long-term appreciation by its owner; that the precious materials extracted from our fragile earth years before have been treated with a sense of respect and gratitude. In recent years an increasing amount of perfectly wearable, well-made jewellery is sold for scrap. Often, such pieces only need professional cleaning and perhaps minor repair work to return their appearance to a desirable item.
Atelier Laibach believes that it has found a generally accepted ethical balance when dealing with previously used jewellery as part of the Laibach restoration, redesigning or recycling service:

We will not usually take on the recycling of nearly new jewellery containing recently mined materials, I.e. pieces less than ten years old. This is in regard to pieces you wish to trade in with us for either cash or credit on a new piece of jewellery. Even recycling (the refining of precious metals) creates a carbon footprint, (but obviously nothing like as huge as freshly mined). So if you want to consider a change, based on your unwanted piece, we can offer you a way to create something fresh from your discarded jewellery with absolute minimum environmental impact ... and if you wish to help reverse its carbon footprint we will offer you the option to pay 10% extra for this service which will go to environmental, wildlife and re-naturing projects.
On this principle, your old jewellery can be completely deconstructed and redesigned into something to suit your taste, while giving something back to the environment. We must repeat however, that lost stones etc. cannot be substituted with new (based on Laibach ethics). Used stones or lab-created options can however be used as substitutes, either supplied by you the customer, or by Atelier Laibach in some cases.

PRE-MILLENNIUM PRINCIPLE

If Kerstin Laibach creates any pieces for sale in her collections using previously mined gems, including diamonds, these are only reclaimed from pre-millennium / damaged jewellery of no intrinsic / historical interest. In other words, only recycled from old jewellery originally purchased as new before December 31st 1999.*
Please note that in practice it can difficult to determine the exact year of a more recent jewellery piece without certification of original purchase date, but in practice Kerstin Laibach is more likely to be reclaiming gems from pieces dated many decades previous to Dec 1999*

* Time-Line Exception to the Pre-Millenium Principle:
Pieces made from old precious stones reclaimed from jewellery sent in by customers for scrap are based on our ten year threshold principle.

MORE INFORMATION ...

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