Recycled gold is having a moment.
The London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), the world’s largest gold trading market, reports that more than half of its gold comes from recycled sources. Brands like Prada and Pandora now boast 100 per cent recycled gold in their products, a pivot Pandora says shrinks its carbon footprint by more than 99 per cent. 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 decision, part of RJC’s new Chain of Custody Standard, tightens up sourcing requirements. But 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 — and that is just one point of contention.
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.
“The term ‘recycled’, as used today by many companies, falsely implies to consumers that using such gold has a decisive positive social and environmental impact,” reads an open letter by a coalition of NGOs arguing that the recycled label goes against established definitions and gives companies a false green image without actually cleaning up the sector.
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 — repeatedly tied to environmental and human rights abuses — 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. Advocates fear that, instead of eradicating new mining, a boom in the recycled market will push them further into poverty and harmful practices.
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 like, say, costume or junk jewellery. 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.
When it comes to gold, what counts as recycled?
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. They cite definitions by the US Environmental Protection Agency and the European Union, which state that ‘recycled’ materials must have been diverted from a waste stream, pointing out that nobody throws out high-value items like old jewellery or gold scraps.
In a bid to address the issue, Sabrina Karib, former sustainability director for precious metal company Argor-Heraeus, launched the Precious Metals Impact Forum (PMIF), a multi-stakeholder group aimed 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’.
PMIF is not the only group pushing for change. In 2023, the Jewellers Vigilance Committee, a New York-based advocacy organisation, petitioned the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to disallow the term ‘recycled gold’ in jewellery claims, since current FTC guidelines say it’s “deceptive” to call an item recycled unless it’s “been recovered or otherwise diverted from a waste stream”. More recently, jewellery giant Signet announced its decision to reject ‘recycled’ in favour of ‘repurposed’, adding that “gold is rarely if ever part of a waste stream”. RJC says PMIF’s proposal was one of many it considered before arriving on its new definition.
“The definition of recycled precious metals was developed following extensive stakeholder engagement, including three rounds of public consultation over a two-year period,” says RJC executive director Melanie Grant. “We took note of all positions and views as well as emerging initiatives to finalise the position.”
RJC adopted the PMIF definition in an earlier draft of its Chain of Custody Standard, but dropped it following backlash from industry members concerned about having to walk back claims made on their products. RJC says that the decision was about maintaining consistency across the market.
“Stakeholders were keen to have a single definition for all precious metals and wanted to maintain a high-level alignment with other programmes to avoid contradictions between requirements and confusion to customers,” says Grant.
For critics, accepting the current definition is just a guise for maintaining business as usual. “The industry has every interest in sticking to this broad definition of ‘recycled gold’, which is not in line with laws and standards,” argues Patrick Schein, a gold trader and vocal critic of the recycled trend. “The more gold sources you can claim as recycled, the easier it is to claim a green image.”
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: “[Newly mined gold] can be considered fabrication scrap with no carbon footprint just one week after it’s extracted… allowing brands to claim a 99 per cent reduction in their footprint,” Schein wrote in a LinkedIn post disputing Pandora’s recycled carbon claims. He adds that, not only has scrap gold never reached a consumer, it also doesn’t shift the market’s status quo, since recovering gold lost in manufacturing has always been standard practice in the industry.
Pandora’s head of sustainability Mads Twomey-Madsen says that its recycled sources include manufacturing scraps, along with industrial waste, old jewellery, silverware and other materials, all of which adhere to the definition laid out in RJC’s Chain of Custody. He adds that recycled sources emit approximately 600 times less carbon than newly mined gold, according to a life cycle assessment made by Ramboll, an independent consultancy hired by Pandora.
Defining recycled gold is only one piece of the puzzle. Another is de-risking it. Since the recycled stamp gives gold a new lease of life, erasing its prior history, experts say, is a magnet for laundering.
“Investigations by civil society organisations and legal cases have repeatedly uncovered instances where illicitly sourced gold has entered legitimate supply chains disguised as recycled,” explains Luca Maiotti, policy analyst for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “It can be mixed with authentic recycled gold during processing, effectively creating a ‘new’ origin.”
Stephen Lezak, a researcher at the University of Oxford who has studied gold markets, agrees that people will always mine for gold, but says recycling can still leave a positive mark: “Mined gold is primarily used as a store of value. When substitutes like recycled gold arrive, demand declines, as does price. Arguing otherwise is a little like saying fossil fuels will always be extracted, so there’s no use in decarbonising.”
Does recycling close the door to ethical gold?
One objection to the recycled trend is that it funnels resources away from solutions in need, among them the recycling of old electronics, or e-waste, which is piling up more quickly than it can be managed, polluting communities worldwide. According to the UN, only 20 per cent of e-waste is formally recycled, and up to 7 per cent of the world’s gold may be locked in landfill.
“End-of-life products like used electronics represent a vast and majorly untapped resource of valuable and critical materials,” says Nikhil Gupta, CEO of US-based recycling startup Determinant Materials, pioneering what he calls “the clean and efficient extraction and purification of critical metals from waste electronics”.
There is also artisanal and small-scale gold mining, a sector that provides much-needed income for some 15 million people but also dumps 2,000 tonnes of mercury into the environment annually — 40 per cent of the global total — according to the UN Environment Programme. Most experts agree the sector isn’t going away and will need support if it is to adopt more responsible methods.
For Andres Castellanos, CEO of a small refinery in Colombia, gaps in the recycled label and industry disengagement are two sides of the same coin, since irresponsibly mined gold can seep into recycled sources. The LBMA, which reported that only 1 per cent of the London market originates from artisanal sources, has urged companies to increase responsible artisanal sourcing — and some are answering the call.
Whether from recycled or artisanal sources, responsible sourcing can reap benefits, but verifying claims will continue to pose a challenge. “The key question remains,” says Schmidt: “How do we prove that it is actually recycled and environmentally friendly gold?”
Partial funding for the reporting of this article was provided by Amazon Aid.
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