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Jewelry

The Backstory

Environmental Issues

Mining for Metals
As a general rule, mining the earth for all the gold, silver, platinum and titanium that go into trinkets and jewelry is not ecologically sound. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), hard-rock mining produces more toxic waste than any other industry in the United States. The disruption of environments and ecosystems alone makes it hard to justify the value of the end product: Some mines extract as little as one ounce of gold from 100 tons of excavated earth.

The environmental disruption isn't limited to waste, either. Mining is considered one of the most energy-intensive industries in the world, consuming as much as 10 percent of the world's energy supply. According to the report "Dirty Metals," published by Oxfam America and the environmental nonprofit Earthworks, the U.S. mining industry consumes the same amount of energy needed to power 25 million single-family homes for a year--2.3 quadrillion BTUs, to be exact. Next, all that mined ore has to be converted into a material suitable for jewelry. That's done in a process called smelting, which consumes even more energy and is responsible for nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide, both potent greenhouse gases and components of smog and acid rain.

Dirty Gold
Gold mining in particular is one of the dirtiest industries in existence. The mining process produces an estimated 1 billion tons of waste rock and milled ore each year in the U.S., and the environmental group WorldWatch Institute estimates that the gold produced for a single .33 ounce, 18-karat gold ring generates 18 tons of mine waste. And this waste doesn't stop at rock and ore. The most serious byproduct of gold mining is acid mine drainage (AMD), the production of acidic water from a combination of sulfide materials, water, air and bacteria. AMD leaks out of both active and inactive mines, polluting municipal water supplies with heavy metals (including arsenic, lead and mercury among others) released from ore as the acid travels underground. AMD can fill open-pit mines with acidic water, which birds and other wildlife then drink, often dying from toxic chemical consumption.

The processes by which gold is extracted from ore pose an additional environmental threat. Cyanide and mercury are the two most popular chemicals used to separate gold, and both leave behind toxic waste that filters into the surrounding environment. Mining companies use cyanide in a process called cyanide heap leaching, which involves piling up tons of earth and spraying the heap with cyanide. The cyanide bonds with small particles of gold as it trickles through the ore, and this water-soluble gold-and-cyanide solution is collected at the bottom (cyanide heap leaching is also used in separating silver from gold). When the process is complete, what remains is a combination of cyanide and milled ore that is stored in underground ponds. Even underground, cyanide poses a threat, where it continues to dissolve earth, causing these underground reservoirs of toxic waste to collapse. In one instance in 2000, a Romanian mine's cyanide reservoir collapsed, releasing cyanide and mine waste into the Danube where thousands of fish were killed as a result.

Not as commonly used as cyanide, liquid mercury is mixed with mud and gravel, and it binds with gold particles. Mercury was popular during the California gold rush, and even over a century later, it's creating a huge problem in Southern California, seeping into nearby lakes and contaminating fish and aquatic wildlife. Mercury is still in use in the Amazon.

Social Issues

Conflict Diamonds
The term "conflict diamonds" was first coined in 1998 by a British advocacy group called Global Witness, and it referred to African diamonds that had been mined in areas controlled by military forces who were opposed to legitimate and internationally recognized governments. Those military groups then traded the diamonds with other countries for money to fund brutal civil wars, like past wars in Angola, Sierra Leone and the Republic of Congo.

In 2002, hoping to eliminate this kind of trade, a large group of diamond-producing and -trading countries banded together to create a regulatory system called the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS). The scheme requires member governments to certify that any rough diamonds shipped out of their countries come from legitimate mines; each shipment should be transported in tamper-proof packaging and accompanied by a certificate of origin. When those diamonds arrive at a cutting and polishing center, the supplier (for instance, De Beers) should verify that the stones came from a KPCS member government.

Despite its good intentions, the KPCS has been criticized for not sticking to those standards and for lax enforcement. Kimberley Process member countries have allegedly failed to submit accurate data on their diamond-production trade statistics, making it difficult to track the flow of conflict diamonds between countries, and conflict diamonds from non-KPCS members are frequently smuggled into member countries, where they're shipped with legitimate KPCS certificates of origin. Today, many conflict diamonds are smuggled into Ghana (a KPCS member) and Mali from rebel-held areas of the Ivory Coast and shipped legally with certificates of origin from those countries. Although leaders of the KPCS say that those illegal diamonds equal a mere 0.1 percent of global supply , estimates place the value of those Ivory Coast diamonds at $23 million --plenty of money to fund wars in a developing nation.

The KPCS has been further undermined by countries outside Africa, like Venezuela. Venezuela's diamond mines produce a relatively low number of diamonds, but since 2005, miners there have smuggled nearly 100 percent of their stones into neighboring Brazil and Guyana, where they get paid higher prices and can avoid paying steep taxes. While the sales of these diamonds haven't gone to fund wars, they've damaged the credibility of third-party auditing and have led American and European suppliers to not buy legitimate diamonds from KPCS members.

Canadian and Australian diamonds help consumers avoid stones that support illegal governments or illicit trade, but supporters of the African diamond trade say they deprive developing economies of a valuable source of income. One company, Pride Diamonds, used in ABC's Grounded Jewels Collection, is working with Sierra Leone diamond miners to improve the mining infrastructure there and filling abandoned mines with earth to prevent malaria-ridden mosquitoes from breeding.

Burmese Rubies
Rubies, sapphires and other semi-precious stones haven't garnered the same attention as conflict diamonds, but they too can have an ugly side. Myanmar (Burma) supplies some of the most valuable rubies, jadeite and semi-precious stones in the world, but many of those stones come from mines rife with forced labor and human rights abuses. Rough Burmese stones that aren't exported directly from Myanmar are sometimes smuggled into Thailand, where they're cut and polished, and then exported again to the U.S. and other countries. In November 2007, the trade group Jewelers of America called on Congress to ban imports of stones from Myanmar and asked its members to source gems from countries such as Kenya, Madagascar, Israel, India, Belgium and South Africa.

Land Rights
Whether the source of precious metals or valuable gem stones, mines inevitably lead to conflicts over land rights, and stories are common of indigenous peoples being forcibly evicted from their land merely for access to mines. In 2003, for instance, the Kalahari Bushmen were removed from their ancestral lands on the Central Kalahari Game Reserve by the Botswana government. Government officials reason that the eviction was due to land conservation, but activists claim that they wanted access to diamond mines, which are jointly owned by the Botswana government and diamond supplier De Beers.

Even the U.S. isn't immune. The Western Shoshone people, who occupy a large area stretching from Southern Idaho to the Mojave Desert in California, were evicted from their native lands during the gold rush of the late 19th century. Shortly thereafter, the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley gave the Shoshone ownership rights to the land and required mining companies to pay them royalties on any natural resources extracted from the land. Royalties have never been paid, and the Shoshone continue fighting today for their money.