All that glisters is not recycled – Goldsmith Review

Reduce, reuse, recycle – ever since the ‘3Rs’ emerged in the 1970s, words that begin with ‘re–’ have been used to denote environmental sustainability, but what do they mean, and are they misleading us? 

A commitment to recycled precious metals is an increasingly common sustainability pledge in jewellery-making (according to the World Gold Council, recycled gold accounted for 28% of the global gold supply in 2020) but a recent open letter is calling for clearer definitions of the term in a bid to combat greenwashing. If rings, watches and necklaces are melted down and used to create new jewellery, what’s wrong with describing that as ‘recycled’?  

High street jeweller Pandora, which now only uses recycled gold and silver, estimates the carbon emissions of recycling gold at less than 1% those of mined gold. And that’s not to mention the 20 tonnes of waste that are generated mining enough gold for a single wedding ring or the use in some mines of mercury and cyanide that can pollute land and water, endangering people and ecosystems.  

However, in their letter, organisations including the Precious Metals Impact Forum and Ethical Metalsmiths argue that the term implies that the gold would otherwise have ended up in landfill, as is the case with lower value materials such as recycled PET bottles. Valuable products such as jewellery are rarely discarded, and precious metals have always been reused. ‘Reusing gold should be a baseline, not something to pat ourselves on the back about,’ says Jos Skeates, managing director of B Corp jeweller EC One.  

If reusing gold doesn’t count as ‘recycling’, what does? Well, it turns out that there is gold that, just like those PET bottles, does currently end up in landfill. Approximately 10% of gold produced annually finds its way into electronic goods, and less than a fifth of e-waste is recycled – even during recycling, most rare earth metals are lost. As a result, when the European Chemical Society redesigned the Periodic Table to highlight the increasing scarcity of naturally occurring elements in 2019, gold, silver, platinum and palladium were all flagged as being at risk, with silver availability in particular facing ‘serious threat’. And so-called ‘e-waste mountains’ hold precious metals, such as gold, in concentrations 40–50 times higher than can be mined underground. According to the authors of the open letter, it is only this ‘reclaimed’ gold that should be described as having been recycled, calling for the term ‘reprocessed’ to be used for gold from non-waste, non-mined sources.  

Pandora does not stipulate whether its ‘recycled’ gold and silver are reclaimed from waste materials – they just have to be recycled and meet the Responsible Jewellery Council Chain of Custody standard. A report they commissioned in 2019 found that global sources of recycled silver (not their own) comprise 60% post-industrial – from the production of ethylene oxide, electronics and other products – 28% from silverware, jewellery and coins, and 12% from photography. ‘It is not possible for us to share an exact breakdown, as this changes constantly and differs from supplier to supplier,’ said a spokesperson for the brand and they didn’t publish equivalent statistics for gold. It’s this sort of lack of transparency that the open letter calls into question, claiming that recycling can even be used to ‘launder’ gold, hiding problematic origins. 

There are plenty of examples of jewellery that is made from waste, such as the 5000 gold, silver and bronze medals made for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the Royal Mint’s 886 range of jewellery, all of which are made from e-waste. In fact, the Royal Mint is due to open an ‘industrial scale plant’ in South Wales later this year, capable of sustainably recovering precious metals from 4,000 tonnes of e-waste annually. ‘We have pioneered a way to safely recover materials from the entire circuit board,’ says their head of sustainability, Inga Doak. ‘This means it can be reused in other products or sent to other facilities for onward processing, helping reduce the environmental impact of UK electronic waste and embracing the principles of a circular economy.’  

Independent jewellers are experimenting with repurposing other types of e-waste too. In 2020, Scottish jeweller Stefanie Cheong and Thailand-based designer Kawisara Anansaringkarn of Coth Studio collaborated on a project to make precious stones suitable for jewellery from a melted-down telephone. They were responding to the amount of e-waste Britain dumps in Southeast Asia – 99% of the UK’s circuit boards are currently shipped overseas. The pair mimicked the processes of natural rock formation as well as ‘plasticglomorate’ – an anthropogenic rock made from plastic, sand and other rock particles that is increasingly appearing on beaches around the world. ‘We wanted to bring attention to the global dumping of e-waste and produce a material by looking at natural rock cycles to influence its fabrication,’ says Cheong. ‘We asked ourselves: “What will these materials look like in thousands or even millions of years?”’  

Sadly, this hands-on, experimental approach is less accessible for precious metals. It is incredibly difficult for independent jewellery makers to extract the tiny metal elements from circuit boards, for example. The process is called ‘hydrometallurgy’ and involves soaking electronic devices in hydrochloric acid to recover particles of precious metals, which can be filtered out of the resulting solution. (The Royal Mint’s process is top secret with reports referring only to a ‘magic green solution.’) ‘It is dangerous and complex,’ says Cheong. ‘I class myself as experimental but having researched it, I decided it was a step too far – that’s why I have never done it.’  

Silversmith and researcher Sandra Wilson has done it, using the recovered metals to create patinas on silver vessels, but only in collaboration with scientists – as she warns other craftspeople, don’t try this at home. She recommends working with chemists or purchasing reclaimed metals from companies such as Metal Clay – which sells an extra thick gold foil made from e-waste – or AgAIN silver, which is reclaimed from medical X-rays in the UK. Welsh designer and founder of Angharad, Meghan Griffiths, already makes all her Angharad Silver and Vermeil pieces from AgAIN silver.  

Whatever we call it – whether it’s reducing, reusing, recycling, reprocessing or reclaiming – it’s time we stopped allowing precious metals to end up in landfill. Not only because we’re running out of minable reserves, and not only because it’s a more sustainable choice, but out of respect for the metals that have been cherished as part of our material culture for millennia.