Should I Buy Recycled or Fairmined Metal for My Ring? Breaking Down What Is Fairmined Gold and What Is Recycled Gold
Metals can set the stage in sustainable, ethical jewelry, and at Bario Neal, clients designing rings and bands, necklaces, earrings, and bracelets get to consider several metals for their handcrafted pieces: Fairmined 14kt and 18kt yellow gold, or recycled yellow, rose, and white gold, platinum, silver, and palladium. (Learn more about each of these metals in “What’s the Most Durable Metal for a Ring?”) Here, we’re digging into what “Fairmined” and “recycled” mean and the history of both metal sources to help all jewelry lovers make an informed purchase.
Fairmined Gold
Metals labeled “Fairmined” come from small-scale mining organizations that commit to responsible practices that minimize harmful impacts of extraction on the planet and people. They receive fair prices for their material. The Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM) set up and continues to oversee the Fairmined certification program, and independent, third-party auditors regularly visit mines to make sure they are adhering to the strict standards. Bario Neal sources Fairmined 14kt and 18kt yellow gold.
“In terms of the environmental and humanitarian impacts of gold mining, I always encourage people to look at the Fairmined model because I think it really addresses both concerns,” says Anna Bario, Bario Neal Principal + Lead Designer.
Because the program ensures fair prices for small-scale mining organizations, a purchase of jewelry handcrafted with Fairmined gold is a chance to make a humanitarian-scale difference and participate in supporting communities that may have, throughout history, been exploited for their natural resources. According to ARM’s annual reports, over the years the program has: fostered the inclusion of more artisanal miners in Peru’s Aurelsa site; provided the mining cooperative at Colombia’s La Llanada with the resources to buy expensive safety equipment and give bonuses that allowed workers to improve their houses; and led to Peru’s Sotrami mine improving the living area for their workers, buying protective equipment for a women’s mineral sorting association, and investing in an educational facility in the community.
Fairmined standards also protects the environment and workers’ health. Traditionally, informal and small gold mining operations—a sector that involves an estimated 20 million people globally—have relied on toxic chemicals such as mercury in their processing, not knowing the damage to rivers and soil as well as community health that can result from improper disposal. Mercury pollutes water and can cause brain damage and kidney failure. The Fairmined standard requires gold miners to practice responsible management of mercury and reduce their use as much as possible. “Fairmined is also an educational model dedicated to teaching miners and communities around them what’s possible in terms of beginning to eliminate mercury from how they process gold, and understanding what impact that has on their own water supply and ecosystem,” Anna says.
Jewelers, like Bario Neal, that work with Fairmined metals and promote that fact must sign a license agreement with the Alliance for Responsible Mining and promise to contribute to the development of the program.
“There is something special about jewelers that support Fairmined,” says Christina Miller, a sustainable jewelry consultant who co-founded Ethical Metalsmiths and Better Without Mercury. “When you sign up to make jewelry with artisanally mined material, whether it's gold, diamonds, silver, colored gemstones, you accept that things are more complicated. The supply can vary. Things can happen in the community that change a mining cooperative’s ability to bring the same amount of materials into production every month. So it's a unique breed of jeweler that is willing to accept those variables and work within those parameters.”
Christina started making jewelry as a teenager. That was around the same time she first considered where precious metals come from. During a trip to Sardinia, which has a 2,000-year-history of mining, her uncle asked her if she knew where her jewelry materials came from. That eventually sparked a lifelong exploration of the impacts of sourcing. She helped to coordinate the first consortium of U.S. jewelers that sourced gold from small mining organizations outside the country. They partnered with ARM and U.S. domestic refiner Hoover & Strong to make it happen.
Bario Neal was part of that consortium. “We have a long history with Fairmined and we're committed to working with Fairmined gold,” Anna says. “We love the material and the certification standard. It's really designed to be beneficial to artisanal miners and a really thoughtful system with continual improvement for both environmental and social impacts at the mines.”
Anna and Christina have both visited Fairmined certified sites and have seen the positive impacts firsthand.
“One of the things that I love about the Fairmined project is that certified mines become teaching sites,” Anna says. “When I visited a Fairmined gold site in Colombia, there were miners there from Bolivia and Peru to learn about changing their processes.”
Christina notes that the sites and mining organizations are quite small but the community impact is very present. “There are often women who are part owners in the cooperatives or members of the association. You see people really working together. There is a sharing of the benefits from what they mine,” Christina says. “Of course, we're still dealing with complicated human behaviors [and history]. And we all know that organizing a group is difficult … so it's not a utopian dream. It's just a heck of a lot better than the alternative.”
Ensuring financial security for mining communities comes with a price, and Fairmined gold is a bit more expensive than recycled gold. But, Christina maintains, it's worth it. “Whether you’re treating yourself to something nice, or you’re making an investment because you’re honoring a relationship that you are seeking to bring some permanence to, whatever your reason, you have options available to you. With a conventional route, you really have no idea where that metal is coming from.” With Fairmined, on the other hand, there’s an assurance regarding traceability and impact. “What you pay for is knowledge that what you're purchasing is more than a gold ring,” Christina continues. “Your purchase is an opportunity for someone's life to be a little better. It's an opportunity to switch from using mercury to less toxic mining practices. It's an opportunity for those miners to then educate other miners and help them improve. It's an investment in a whole system of who benefits.”
Fairmined gold has a subtle color variation that makes jewelry handcrafted with the material distinct. Bario Neal rings of 14kt Fairmined gold have a warmer tone than rings with 18kt Fairmined gold—due to a slight difference in the metals used in the creation of each gold alloy. This is a common difference between 14kt and 18kt gold no matter the source, but Bario Neal designers say they’ve found the variation to be even more striking when crafting with the Fairmined metal.
Suppliers of Fairmined gold buy from several different mines in different countries as necessary to make sure they have enough stock to fill orders, according to Christina. But they can tell jewelers, based on a particular period in time, which mine and which country a particular batch that they're processing came from. “So one month, the rings at Bario Neal might come from a Peruvian artisanal mine,” she says, “and the next month they might come from one in Colombia.”
Consumers should note that there’s a different gold label, Fairtrade Certified Gold Standard, that adheres to similar standards and independent auditing practices as the Fairmined project. However, the term “fair trade” understandably causes some confusion. “The concept of fair trade is an idea that we should pay a fair price for products that we buy,” Christina explains. “There is no third-party evaluation of it. And there's no consistent agreement on what are the terms of fair trade.” Clients informed about these differences, she says, can ask a plain question to retailers who say they’re “fair trade”: “Can you please explain to me what you do?” The answer should be thorough. A jeweler like Bario Neal, for example, can provide documentation and describe in detail the independent auditing process that verifies such labels.
Recycled Metals
Bario Neal works with recycled yellow, rose, and white gold, platinum, silver, and palladium.
While local governments across the United States are struggling with recycling plastics and paper from households, the established value of metals—and the relatively straightforward process of melting metals down—make recycled metals more viable for clients looking for sustainable jewelry. For waste like cardboard and milk jugs, the value often isn't high enough to make it worth recycling. Or we don't yet have the technology to break down materials like certain plastics. “But people know to hold on to precious metals, even if it's just that they don't get thrown away or they end up in an estate auction or a thrift store,” Anna says. “For the most part, these metals stay in the supply at a much higher rate than other consumer goods.
With recycled metals, no new mining is required, which is a factor for many clients concerned about what extractive industries do to the environment. Large-scale mining can lead to a detrimental clearing of forests and stripping the soil of nutrients.
Recycled metals were one of the first responsibly sourced materials that Bario Neal worked with. They source from two domestic refineries that work only in recycled precious metals and prioritize environmentally sustainable practices.
Recycled metals don’t mean zero impact, of course, because refineries do need energy to operate. However, Bario Neal’s partners, Anna says, are very conscious of their carbon footprint and environmental impact. “There also are a lot of processes in refining that can be air pollutants,” she says. “So they have advanced scrubber technology, those towers you see over plants, to make sure that none of that is escaping into our air.” In the last decade, one built a LEED-certified facility, which means they find ways to reduce waste and air pollution and use minimal energy and water as they work. They treat and reuse production wastewater (called a “closed-loop water system”). They heat their building with the energy that's generated by their furnaces.
The refiners have many sources for their recycling process: There are precious metals in electronics, and jewelers like Bario Neal send in studio materials. “That can include pieces of rings but also the hand towels that our jewelers use to wash their hands, and the filters from our air cleaning system. Anything in the studio that might have precious metal dust on it gets sent,” Anna explains.
The refiners burn these materials (nothing toxic though!) in big furnaces and the melted metal that remains is separated by type. After further processing, it gets poured into ingots or forms suitable for jewelry making.
There is no difference in quality between recycled metals and metals mined last week. In fact, you probably already have jewelry containing at least some recycled metals. "It's probable because gold is melted down in large batches. The chances that gold jewelry doesn't have some percentage, maybe it's 1% or 10% or 30%, that's never been in circulation before is pretty low," Anna says. "Typically in the refining process there's some crossover between newly mined material and metal from jewelry makers' scrap, bullion, electronics, old jewelry. There might be gold that was mined thousands of years ago in India in the recycled mix. We just have no idea. There's no traceability at this point for where the metal could have come from in that recycled or mixed batch of gold.” (She notes that Fairmined gold is very tightly tracked, and gets processed alone.)
Christina has seen the power of recycled metals up close, if from another angle. She created the Radical Jewelry Makeover with Susie Ganch, who is the program director today and interim chair for the Department of Craft and Material Studies in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. They take donations—everything from gumball machine rings to wedding rings—for students to melt down and use as they learn to make jewelry. Anna and Bario Neal co-founder Page Neal were among the first participants in Radical Jewelry Makeover almost 10 years ago.
“We know there's plenty of jewelry on the surface of the planet. A lot of it's not being worn, it's in jewelry boxes, or it's in thrift stores,” Christina says. “And that's a shame, because it takes so many resources to make the stuff. And students need to learn the skills of working with precious metals, but precious metals are getting more and more expensive. Through a project like this, we can give them some hands-on experience. Radical Jewelry Makeover events have been this amazing access point for communities to consider where jewelry comes from, where the metals come from and how jewelry is made.”
When it comes to being thoughtful about the source of materials for your own pieces, ultimately, investing some time in learning about recycled and Fairmined metals is worthwhile. As Christina notes of Fairmined’s equitable and sustainable system: “If you're buying something as intimate as a piece of jewelry, it feels a whole heck of a lot better if you know who's benefiting along the way. It makes it shine a little brighter. It makes its touch to the skin a little warmer.”