Editor’s Note
This article introduces a new guide developed by ORIGEN – Gold for Future and gemologist Carmen García-Carballido to help jewelers source colored gemstones with positive social and environmental impact. As demand grows for ethically produced jewelry, this resource aims to provide clarity and options for more responsible sourcing.
The need to identify options for creating jewelry with a positive impact has led the collective ORIGEN – Gold for Future to develop a new publication in collaboration with geologist and gemologist Carmen García-Carballido, founder of Ethical Gemstones of the World.
To a greater or lesser extent, almost everyone involved in creating jewelry uses colored gemstones.
Colored gemstones are available in an immense variety of types, multiple colors, shapes, and meanings, which give them symbolic value and an identity beyond their decorative and ornamental function. But what is really known about their origin and the journey they take to become a jewel?
The collective ORIGEN – Gold for Future presents a new publication created with gemologist Carmen García-Carballido that examines the impacts in the colored gemstone supply chain and proposes different responsible sourcing alternatives.
A previous publication by ORIGEN – Gold for Future, “Responsible Jewelry. A Guide to Understanding the Impacts of Jewelry Activities, Knowing Responsible Sourcing Alternatives, and Exploring Other Sustainable Practices in the Workshop and Company,” explains how the supply chains for most raw materials used in jewelry are linked to serious environmental damage, armed conflicts, corruption, child labor, and all kinds of human rights violations in a large number of countries in the Global South. This dark reality also applies to colored gemstones, which travel through a very opaque and largely uncontrolled market involving many actors and intermediaries.
Furthermore, 90% of gemstones are extracted in countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America where artisanal mining is often a subsistence activity driven by poverty and lack of opportunities. Particularly during the extraction phase, but also in their processing, a series of problems are observed that, as professionals and lovers of jewelry, it is pertinent to know.
This concern, and above all the need to identify options for creating jewelry with a positive impact, has led the ORIGEN – Gold for Future collective to develop the new monograph “Responsible Gems. From Mine to Jewel: A Critical Approach to the Colored Gemstone Supply Chain for the Search of Responsible Sourcing Alternatives,” together with geologist and gemologist Carmen García-Carballido, founder of Ethical Gemstones of the World.
The publication consists of six chapters that analyze the colored gemstone market, the rights violations, and the environmental effects that commonly occur in different phases of the supply chain, aiming to provide valuable information to guide towards better responsible jewelry practices. It also provides a description of four inspiring projects of artisanal mining and responsible sourcing of gemstones from countries such as Madagascar, Tanzania, and Zambia, among others.