Ethical Gold and Platinum

At Ingle & Rhode, we use ethical gold and platinum. Our gold is produced and sold on a fairtrade basis by small-scale mining communities Eco Andina in Argentina and Oro Verde in Colombia.  For more information, please visit our fair trade gold page. For ethical platinum we work with a refinery in the US that supplies us with pure platinum that is guaranteed to be 100% post-consumer recycled.

Unfortunately, most of the gold used in the jewellery industry is produced at a terrible cost, both socially and environmentally. Large-scale gold mining typically involves the use of cyanide in the extraction of the metal, and the creation of a single gold wedding band can leave behind several tones of toxic mine waste.

In the developing world, local people rarely have any say in the granting of mining licenses, and there are numerous cases of mining companies committing human rights abuses. There are many cases of indigenous peoples have been forcibly removed from their lands to make way for new mines, only to gain no share of the profits.

Small-scale artisanal mining can be just as problematic. Globally, over one hundred million workers are trapped in unfair supply chains. They struggle to get a fair price for the gold they produce, and commonly receive as little as 70% of the true market value. In order to earn a living, most artisanal miners use mercury to increase their yield, which is highly hazardous to their health and that of their families and local communities, and pollutes their local environment.

For more information about the problems with gold mining please visit http://www.nodirtygold.org.