Editor’s Note
As major brands increasingly adopt recycled gold, the industry faces new questions about standards and verification. This article examines the recent guidelines from the Responsible Jewellery Council and the growing debate around what constitutes truly sustainable sourcing.
Recycled gold is having a moment. Brands like Prada and Pandora now boast 100 per cent recycled gold in their products. And last month, the Responsible Jewellery Council (RJC), the industry’s largest association, released guidelines that will set the norm on how to define and verify recycled gold as more brands show interest.
The RJC maintains a loose definition of recycled gold, which includes old jewellery as well as reprocessed “scrap” that has not yet reached a consumer. The inability to clearly define what counts as recycled gold has become the subject of intense debate among researchers, industry members and other experts.
While proponents say that higher recycled volumes can decrease mining, skeptics counter that increasing dependence on recycled gold as a blanket sustainability strategy undermines legitimate efforts to improve the supply chain, while overestimating its environmental benefits, and — in worst case scenarios — providing an avenue to smuggle illicit, newly mined gold.
In principle, reusing gold already in circulation should have a smaller environmental footprint than mining it out of the ground, but the reality is more complicated. For one, recycling attracts bad actors who launder illicit gold into the legitimate recycled market. Meanwhile, small-scale gold mining provides vital income to millions, especially in communities where the practice is not going to stop if there are no economic alternatives to replace it.
Part of what makes recycled gold so hard to pin down is, basically, that it‘s gold. Unlike other recycled materials, gold doesn’t degrade over time, and it holds such high value that people don’t throw it away. What’s more, gold is melted down and reprocessed many times on its path to market, making it very difficult to trace, and meaning that how green recycled gold is will hinge on how stringently the recycled label is defined — and enforced.
RJC’s latest definition classifies recycled gold into three groups: ‘pre-consumer’, including manufacturing scraps and other reprocessed material; ‘post-consumer’, such as old jewellery that’s been melted down; and ‘waste’, such as discarded electronics. But critics say only ‘waste’ should count.
The Precious Metals Industry Forum (PMIF), a multi-stakeholder group, aims at narrowing the scope of what counts as recycled gold. According to PMIF, the recycled tag should only apply to gold recovered from products “containing less than 2 per cent of gold in weight”, like electronics, while old jewellery and other high-value materials should be labelled as ‘reprocessed’. More recently, jewellery giant Cartier moved to reject ‘recycled’ in favour of ‘repurposed’, adding that “gold is rarely if ever part of a waste stream”.
For critics, accepting the current definition is just a guise for maintaining business as usual.
Not all experts agree that melting down high-value items such as jewellery shouldn’t count as recycled. Mario Schmidt, director of the Institute for Industrial Ecology (INEC) at Pforzheim University, says “recycling is defined by the fact that it has been used by the end consumer.” Based in Pforzheim, Germany’s gold-refining hub, Schmidt is a proponent of the environmental gains for melting down old jewellery, but is more cautious when it comes to the so-called ‘pre-consumer’ materials, which includes manufacturing scrap. “Strictly speaking, this is not recycling; only an inefficiency in production.”
Others have also expressed concerns about factoring scraps into the carbon calculus, a key issue with counting pre-consumer gold as recycled.
