Editor’s Note
The Responsible Jewellery Council has updated its core standards following a five-year review. These revisions aim to help companies across the supply chain integrate responsible practices into their operations.
The Responsible Jewellery Council (RJC) has just announced new updates to the Code of Practices (COP) and Chain of Custody (COC) standards following the 5-year annual review. These RJC standards enable companies across the entire supply chain, from mining to retail, to integrate responsible practices into their management systems and daily operations.
Currently, there are two standards available for RJC members: the RJC Code of Practices (COP), which provides a common standard for ethical, social, human rights, and environmental practices in mining, laboratories, precious metals, diamonds, and colored gemstones; and the Chain of Custody (COC), which defines an approach for companies to handle and trade gold, silver, and platinum group metals in a fully traceable and responsibly sourced manner.
In 2022, the RJC initiated the process to update the COC standard, and in 2021, the COP standard, in accordance with ISEAL requirements. During the three-year COP consultation process and the two-year COC process, the RJC received over 1,200 comments from a wide range of industry and non-industry stakeholders. This review of the standards was made possible thanks to the collaborations and contributions of a dedicated team of professionals and expert consultants and included three intensive 60-day public consultation rounds for both COP and COC; additionally, the COC included another 30 days of public consultations focused solely on “recycled” precious metals.
With the aim of defining “recycled” precious metals, the COC standard has been updated to recognize three main types of eligible material: pre-consumer, post-consumer, waste, and a combination of the three. For this, the RJC has used the same definitions and categorization as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), although in this case, its definition is only for gold, and the RJC standard has been expanded to all precious metals. Thus, the COC update also requires greater transparency by requiring declarations of the type of material used.
For the COP standard, the key topics were human rights, climate and environmental requirements, supply chain, diversity, and inclusion, leading to a standard with a greater focus and guidance on human rights due diligence in line with the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
Both updated standards adhere to the ISEAL Code of Good Practice for Standard-Setting, ensuring a credible and transparent process that incorporates a wide range of stakeholder feedback.