Understanding the jewelry supply chain helps us make more responsible choices about where our dollars are going and they go deeper than supporting small businesses. There's too much willful blindness in the jewelry industry. Because no one wants to talk about the journey of gold, consumers aren't generally aware of where their gold jewelry comes from and how easy it can be to choose better. According to the World Gold Council, gold jewelry accounts for more than 50% of total gold demand.
Networks of coercion, violence, human rights abuses, environmental degradation, and smuggling dominate the mining landscape. New gold is the preferred method of drug smugglers and sex traffickers because it's easy to launder, it's untraceable, and it's a commodity that can be sold to major legitimate companies, unlike drugs. Once gold has been melted, there's no way to separate legal gold from illicit gold. In a Senate hearing, linked below, Senators Marco Rubio and Oregon's Ron Wyden discuss how illegal mining is impacting human rights.
The price of gold has skyrocketed from just $400/troy ounce in 2000 to over $2,000/troy ounce today and illegal mining is surging. According to Greenpeace, illegal gold mining affects more than 30 million people in the Amazon, particularly indigenous people by contamination of mercury in the rivers and the destruction of sacred sites. Local indigenous people are forced into labor and prevented from leaving. Sex trafficking has "exploded" in order to supply brothels in illicit mining camps. The CNN article linked below explains how indigenous communities are forced to battle with illegal miners who are poisoning their water and shooting their children. In the photo above from the same article is an image of women preparing for war to protect their community against illegal gold mining.
In South Africa, where over 40% of the gold has been mined, thousands of adults and children have died illegally mining gold in abandoned mine shafts, sometimes spending years underground. The article by the New Yorker linked below, outlines how these mines came exist and how Ernest Oppenheimer once again used apartheid in South Africa to corner the market.
Illicit gold dominates the gold market. Well over half of the gold on the market is considered illegal, having supported organizations and governments that have been designated as criminal. Considering the untraceable nature of gold, one would assume that there's a higher percentage of illegal gold on the market than we've managed to account for.
The ugly story of gold isn't a history, it's happening with nearly every new jewelry purchase and you have the power to make a change. Unlike your cell phone or other everyday electronics or items that also contain gold, you have a better choice when it comes to how you buy jewelry and it's as easy as opening a conversation. If you don't know where your gold comes from, this is an opportunity to elevate the way we love jewelry. Ethically sourced gold is as simple as making a choice in a drop-down menu and more affordable than you might think. I'll be discussing the two other types of gold sources in my next blog posts.
(Sources and selected reading:)
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/19/americas/amazon-illegal-mining-brazil-cmd-intl/index.html
https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/59869/illlegal-mining-amazon-threat-biodiversity/