Editor’s Note
This article highlights the critical link between material efficiency and sustainable manufacturing. By focusing on yield improvement and waste reduction—through approaches like Lean Management and holistic resource stewardship—manufacturers can achieve both economic and environmental benefits.
Material efficiency and waste reduction are central to manufacturing sustainability. This is directly linked to improving production yields and minimizing waste. For example:
Beyond precious metals, sustainable manufacturing requires systematic management of water, chemicals, consumables, and packaging.
A rethinking of internal logistics and packaging design can cut non-core waste by 15 to 20%, while also improving operational consistency.
The circular economy is an alternative to the traditional linear industrial model of take–make–dispose. Instead, it focuses on keeping materials in use for as long as possible through reuse, recycling, recovery, and regeneration.
Manufacturers are shifting to recyclable consumables and packaging, including reduced plastic packaging.
Sustainability in jewellery is often viewed through broad industry narratives — responsible mining, ethical diamonds, or consumer-facing commitments. However, real sustainability is built within the supply chain and on the manufacturing floor.
From a manufacturing and supply chain leadership perspective, sustainability is not a parallel initiative. It is embedded into how we:
– Source precious materials responsibly
– Lower energy and resource intensity
– Protect worker health and safety
– Apply the Circular Economy concept to precious metals and diamonds
– Strengthen transparency and governance
Sustainable manufacturing is fundamentally about creating long-term value while minimizing environmental impact and strengthening trust across stakeholders.
Ethically sourcing materials is the first and most critical step in responsible jewellery manufacturing. Precious metals and diamonds, due to their complexity and global supply networks, require robust systems of vendor governance, traceability, and periodic audits to ensure they are sourced responsibly. Ethical sourcing processes must be:
– Transparent and verifiable
– Replicable over time
– Consistent across suppliers
– Fully compliant with applicable laws and standards
Material efficiency is central to sustainability in jewellery manufacturing, where production involves casting, machining, polishing, and finishing. While process losses may appear small in isolation, when compounded across scale and time, they lead to significant environmental and economic impact.
Targets include:
– Reducing process loss by 6-8% and bringing it to 10 to 12%
– Increasing recovery rates to 95%
– Reducing the net loss to near 1%
This can be achieved through investments in:
– Enhanced recovery technologies
– Improved process controls
– Improved refining controls with zero effluent discharge systems
– Standardised operating practices
These improvements deliver dual outcomes: strengthened cost competitiveness and reduced environmental footprint.
Sustainable manufacturing is often enabled not by revolutionary innovation, but by continuous process optimisation. A major driver of this is data-led production management. By systematically tracking rejected parts, rework cycles, and downtime patterns, manufacturing teams can identify root causes rather than treating symptoms.
Make it right the first time and every time by storing data for each process along with timelines for manufacturing.
Jewellery production is inherently energy-intensive, particularly in melting, casting, and finishing operations. Achieving sustainability, therefore, requires maximising energy efficiency through:
– Adoption of energy-efficient equipment
– Optimisation of batch sizes and furnace loads
– Peak load management during high-production cycles
With disciplined operational approaches, manufacturers can achieve 10 to 15% lower energy consumption per unit produced, without compromising either quality or output.
The cultural dimension of sustainable manufacturing is often underestimated. When teams understand that efficiency, quality, and responsibility reinforce one another, sustainability becomes a shared operational vision rather than a top-down mandate.
Sustainability must be viewed not as a cost of compliance, but as a long-term business necessity. Responsible operations:
– Increase resilience in supply chains
– Reduce sourcing-related disruptions
– Lower operating costs over time
– Strengthen transparency with regulators, partners, and consumers
These benefits scale alongside business growth.
Jewellery is almost uniquely positioned for a circular economy, because the core materials (gold, platinum, diamonds) don’t degrade — they can be recovered, reused, and revalued indefinitely.