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When she flew over the Brazilian Amazon last year, ethologist Dr Jane Goodall saw the heartbreaking sight of illegal gold mining destroying the ecosystem below.
“I’m not really a jewellery person. But to see miles and miles and miles of beautiful river — a sickly kind of yellow from mercury poisoning; to see these huge [vessels], they look like barges, and they dredge up mud from the river bottom every day — it’s unbelievably destructive,” she says. “And this is going on not only in the Amazon. It’s going on across Africa and in Asia.”
A lifelong advocate for ecosystem protection and the natural world, Goodall, 90, wanted after that trip to draw the world’s attention to the downsides of gold mining and the role that consumer habits play in perpetuating them.
The launch of the Jane Goodall Collection today — a ring, a bracelet, two sets of earrings and three necklaces priced from $895-2,995 — with California-based jeweller Brilliant Earth is her way of delivering that message.
“Hopefully, it will draw attention to the horror of jewellery from illegally mined gold,” says Dr Goodall. “There’s so much that can be recycled.”
The collection is made from recycled gold and lab-grown diamonds that Brilliant Earth says are made from carbon captured before it’s released into the atmosphere. “That was in conversation with Jane, just really thinking about — how do we create a collection that is going to minimise our impact and promote ethical practices? The carbon capture diamonds are really the showcase of it, and then being able to be set in recycled gold, not newly mined gold, [was really important],” says CEO Beth Gerstein. The motif for the designs is the banana leaf, she explains — “a nod to Jane’s groundbreaking work where she discovered that chimps use tools”.
“I said it should somehow link to nature, they sent me various designs,” says Dr Goodall. “The banana leaf — in some places, it’s a plate. You can serve a meal on a banana leaf. It can be ground up into fertiliser, some creatures eat it. It’s a wonderful motif for this particular Jane set of jewellery.”
Recycled gold
While recycled gold sounds like it has obvious environmental benefits, experts say the reality is not that simple. They point out that gold has always been recycled — no one is throwing their gold away — so they are sceptical that the surge in recent years of companies saying they use recycled gold as part of their sustainability strategies is leading to any real change in the gold supply chain. As it stands today, recycled gold, aside from lacking a standardised definition, is impossible to trace, according to a wide range of experts. That leaves it open to smuggling and the possibility that newly mined gold can be sold as recycled, both of which are thought to occur regularly.
Concerns over recycled gold have grown so great that Signet, reportedly the world’s largest diamond jewellery retailer, this summer disavowed the term entirely. “Recycled should really only apply to products intentionally diverted from a waste stream. And gold is rarely if ever part of a waste stream,” the company’s statement said.
Experts also say that gold mining is not going anywhere — it’s the lifeblood of too many communities around the world that subsist on small-scale mining, and the best thing for jewellery companies to do, they say, is to encourage those communities to adopt more responsible mining practices and support them in maintaining them. Shying away from the problem only helps to perpetuate it, they say.
Brilliant Earth says it works diligently with suppliers to improve the integrity of its gold sources. “We advocate for transparency across the industry to ensure that we are driving lasting change across the supply chain,” says Gerstein. “We believe that all of these ongoing efforts are necessary to lead the industry towards more responsible and transparent practices for our sources of gold.” The brand also works with initiatives that support responsible small-scale mining practices, but recycled gold was the only choice for the latest launch, says Gerstein.
Dr Goodall, whose non-profit is aimed at “protecting chimpanzees and inspiring people to conserve the natural world we all share”, already has partnerships in a number of sectors (including fashion). They represent an effort to both educate people about the issues within those industries as well as model other — more ethical, more environmentally responsible — ways of conducting business. Jewellery is the latest sector to which she is drawing her attention and the unrivalled gravitas it holds. For Brilliant Earth, the hope is that Dr Goodall’s support will underscore the urgency of the problems the brand says it’s working to address and the need to upend the industry’s often-destructive status quo.
The partnership between the jewellery brand and the conservation icon began over a year ago, according to Gerstein, and to celebrate Dr Goodall’s 90th birthday in the spring, the Brilliant Earth Foundation donated $100,000 to the Jane Goodall Institute as an “inaugural contribution” and announced at the time that a collection would be released later in the year. Brilliant Earth will donate further funds to the Jane Goodall Institute through sales of the collection. “The overall goal is to support her legacy,” says Gerstein.
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