Until recently, Daniela Colaiacovo had stopped wearing jewellery altogether — often being unsure of its provenance and materials.
But, last spring, in a busy café in Milan, Colaiacovo — a former gold prospector turned designer behind the jewellery line Makal — was sporting a ring of her own design, handcrafted in the shape of the tool the Mayans once used to pan for gold deposits in rivers and streams. A silver dome echoes the traditional vessel made of a solid piece of wood in a rounded, shallow shape. A gold nugget, still in its raw form, nestled inside.
The Italian entrepreneur was drawn to the glittering nuggets after her own family’s gold mine wrapped up production in 2015, and so she began another form of exploration. She now uses certified gold from small producers as the signature of her jewellery range.
Colaiacovo was keen to create a collection she could trace from mine to jewellery, guaranteeing the ethical provenance of gold mined in small operations — what the industry calls artisanal gold — and driving transparency in an opaque supply chain plagued with ugly environmental and humanitarian problems. She hopes to alter consumer habits in the process.
Tracking gold from mine to finished product along the global supply chain has long been a source of contention. Often, batches of the precious metal are mixed at refineries, and gold ore mined from a war zone or by a child is difficult to pinpoint by the time the finished product is in a shop window.
“If you’re a large luxury brand working with huge margins, you can spend unlimited amounts [of money] tracing gold up and down the supply chain,” says Assheton Carter, co-founder of Makal. “The greatest difficulty is not the ability of the big brands to do something, it’s the other 98 per cent of the industry, which is smaller brands, and rethinking their supply chains.”
About 20 per cent of the world’s mined gold comes from artisanal and small-scale gold mines, according to World Bank estimates. These are typically holes in the ground where miners — including children — hack at rock. Sometimes, mercury is mixed with the ore to separate the gold. Globally, there are about 40mn people working in artisanal and small-scale mining — including about a million children, according to advocacy group Human Rights Watch.
And there has been significant growth in artisanal and small-scale mining in many developing countries over the past 20 years, according to the World Gold Council, with most of the mining taking place outside legal frameworks, often with poor safety and environmental standards.
Ethical alternatives, however, are not easy to source or even identify. The annual gold supply from the artisanal and small-scale mining sector is equivalent to approximately 500 tonnes, with a market value of almost $29bn, according to a UN report — which is a problem for luxury brands vying to gain relevance with customers who value sustainability.
“There is a genuine mess in the jewellery industry,” says Greg Valerio, a jeweller and activist. “We’re dealing with a non-renewable extractive. There is no such thing as sustainable jewellery. It does not exist, because we all deal in non-renewable extractive industries.
“We need to start from the proposition that gold must be fully traceable and fully transparent. If you do not have those two components, in the context of an ethical claim, it’s just greenwashing.”
Grant Conner, a fourth-generation gold dealer, compares the responsible gold sector to the explosion of the organic food industry. “People were slapping the organic label on a lot of other stuff; we’re going to see a lot of that,” he warns.
Colaiacovo is confident of Makal’s traceability by opting to buy its gold exclusively from Nuggets by Grant, a US business founded in 2013 by Conner. It sells gold from placer miners — small artisanal mining communities that extract the ore using eco-friendly methods and without slave labour or unethical practices.
“It’s not enough just to buy natural nuggets,” Colaiacovo says. “You need to know their source and vet suppliers.” Her jewellery settings are produced from Fairtrade gold, a certification that guarantees the metal was mined in a responsible manner and that its miners have received fair payment and an overall premium.
The standard was defined in 2011 by the Alliance for Responsible Mining (Arm), a non-profit organisation that supports artisanal and small-scale mining communities in Latin…
Read More: How traceability of gold became a focus for independent jewellers