Fair­trade & Fairmined Gold. P U R E arm sculp­ture by Ute Decker, www.utedecker.com

Min­ing pre­cious met­als is a murky busi­ness. Cyanide leach­ing is just one of many health, safety, and eth­i­cal issues that makes min­ing pre­cious met­als so ques­tion­able in prac­tice and in the­ory. Once the metal is extracted, the ore is crushed, piled in enor­mous heaps, and sprayed with cyanide. This causes the gold to leach out of the ore. Some mines use sev­eral tons of cyanide per day, and a rice-grain sized dose of cyanide can be fatal. Once the metal is extracted from the leached ore, the cyanide-contaminated waste is com­monly aban­doned. What does this mean to jew­elry design? A sin­gle gold ring gen­er­ates about eigh­teen tons of waste ore. Other con­cerns in the min­ing indus­try involve the use of child labor, dan­ger­ous work­ing con­di­tions, and destruc­tive envi­ron­men­tal practices.

Fair­trade & Fairmined Gold. PURE dou­ble ring by Ute Decker

Some of those work­ing with these met­als are work­ing towards mak­ing a brighter future for jew­elry for those who work in it as well as those who pur­chase it. In Feb­ru­ary 2011, Fair­trade and Fairmined Gold was offi­cially intro­duced. You may remem­ber my Acad­emy Awards post about Livia Giug­gi­oli, wife of Oscar win­ner, Colin Firth, wear­ing Fair­trade and Fairmined Gold jew­elry on the red car­pet. Back in Feb­ru­ary, twenty British jew­el­ers were granted a license to work in Fair­trade and Fairmined Gold. The metal comes from allu­vial deposit­sThat num­ber is now thirty with a wait­list of at least one hun­dred oth­ers. One of those orig­i­nal license hold­ers is stu­dio jew­elry arti­san, Ute Decker.

Decker’s PURE col­lec­tion, lean and curvi­lin­ear line of bracelets, rings, ear­rings, and cuf­flinks. Accord­ing to the designer, “A Fair­trade pre­mium on the cost of gold bul­lion from the PURE col­lec­tion directly ben­e­fits the small arti­sanal min­ing com­mu­nity of Oro Verde. Through their pur­chase dis­cern­ing jew­ellery lovers sup­port Oro Verde in pro­tect­ing more than 4500 hectares of trop­i­cal rain­for­est in the Choco Biore­gion of Colum­bia.” In addi­tion, Decker says that Fair­trade and Fairmined Gold pro­motes envi­ron­men­tal stan­dards as well as pays a fair wage to miners.

How do you know if a designer is work­ing in F & F Gold? The jew­elry is stamped with a mark that indi­cates the source of the gold, along­side the hall­mark for it purity. Decker notes that get­ting F & F Gold isn’t always easy and is in lim­ited sup­ply. Right now there are nine min­ing coop­er­a­tives in Latin Amer­ica and mines from Asia and Africa will be join­ing the sys­tem in the com­ing months.

Recy­cled sil­ver. Sphere arm piece by Ute Decker

What else does Ute Decker do to stay green and eth­i­cal? She uses recy­cled sil­ver and bio-resin (more on this next). Now met­als like gold and sil­ver have been recy­cled by jew­el­ers for cen­turies, even new metal has some recy­cled metal in it. The designer says she prefers using recy­cled sil­ver to new metal because she feels it is envi­ron­men­tally friend­lier and reduces the indus­try pres­sure to source it from min­ing. The qual­ity of recy­cled sil­ver is the same as newly mined mate­r­ial: it is avail­able as Bri­tan­nia, (95.84 per­cent pure sil­ver), fine sil­ver (99 per­cent pure sil­ver) or ster­ling sil­ver (92.5 per­cent pure silver).

Bio-resin. Neck­lace by Ute Decker

Bio-resin…what’s that? I had never come across this term or the mate­r­ial. Poly­ester resin is a form of plas­tic which has health and safety con­cerns. Bio-resin is made from sun­flow­ers, or rather, sun­flower oil. It is non­toxic and Decker points out that is even food safe (move over melamine). Decker devel­oped a tech­nique to give the mate­r­ial the look of sponge coral, a gem-like mate­r­ial used in jew­elry that comes from the struc­tures made by marine organ­isms for whom pol­lu­tion and poach­ing have made them endangered.