Taking Responsibility

The jewellery industry is keen to clean up its act, with a whole wave of young brands going about it in uniquely brilliant directions

Anyone who has tried to substitute sustainable practices into their daily routine will vouch for the fact that it’s far from a walk in the park. Change takes time, especially so if your way of doing things is ingrained. For the biggest jewellery brands — their supply, production, and distribution chains multi-layered — the process of change is particularly protracted. That’s why when it comes to sustainability they talk long-term of meeting targets, reaching goals, and, in the case of Chopard, embarking on a journey.

Their journey started a decade ago, the mission: “to change not only Chopard as a company and brand, but also the entire industry,” said Caroline Scheufele, the brand’s CoPresident and Artistic Director.

The first step saw Chopard engage with The Alliance for Responsible Mining to support and enable gold mining communities to achieve Fairminded Certification (the guarantee of being part of a responsible and conflict-free supply chain). Responsible watch and jewellery lines followed, most notably the spectacular Green Carpet Collection — unveiled on the red carpet in Cannes in 2013 — to which Scheufele continues to add unique pieces. But a genuine milestone was reached in 2018 when it was announced that family-run Chopard would commit to using only 100% ethical gold in its watch and jewellery pieces — the first of such brands to do so.

“The biggest challenge was change itself, because people are used to doing things in a certain way,” said Scheufele. “The people in our workshops had a routine and it was hard for them to go out of their comfort zone. We had to make them understand why we were doing this, because it’s they who have to do the job. It was a challenge indeed, but we obviously proved we could do it.” Ethical practice has long been a key consideration at Tiffany & Co. At the turn of the century, it was among the first companies to stop using coral in jewellery, and has since established an overarching policy of responsible practice as it takes important steps towards hitting its 2025 Sustainability Goals. One giant leap came in 2020, when it announced an industry first in diamond traceability — namely, the ability to state the country of origin for each stone over 0.18 carats. By 2025, 100% of the individually registered diamonds and precious metals used by Tiffany in its jewellery production will be traceable. “We believe that our customers deserve to know that a Tiffany diamond was sourced with the highest standards, not only as regards quality, but also social and environmental responsibility. Diamond traceability is the best means to ensure both,” believes Victoria Reynolds, the brand’s Chief Gemologist. While such legacy brands continue their shift towards sustainability, a new wave of social-minded, ethicsdriven entrepreneurs have entered the field of fine jewellery, creative in their approach to capturing today’s conscious consumer.

S idney Neuhaus and Jessica Warch both grew up in families embedded in Antwerp’s centuries-old diamond trade, but when the pair teamed up to launch their own fine jewellery business, Kimai, their approach would be a marked turn from the traditional way of doing things. Moving beyond mines — the starting point of a natural diamond’s long and often murky supply chain — Neuhaus and Warch decided to use only lab-grown diamonds, paired with 18k recycled gold. Their approach won a slew of celebrity fans, including Megan Markle and Emma Watson, the investment of fashion titan Diane Von Furstenberg, and a coveted spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. R ecycling metal is a path many new designers have decided to walk. In the unique case of New York native Elizabeth Suda and her brand Article 22, that metal comes from unexploded bombs. Suda was in Laos when she met artisans in a rural village melting US-dropped bombs into spoons. Those same artisans now make Article 22’s jewellery, their work sustained by the startling statistic of there being an estimated 80 million unexploded bombs of 250 million dropped during America’s

'Secret War' in Laos from 1963-1974.

H atton Garden-trained Eliza Walter was just 24 when she launched Lylie in 2017, determined to lighten the heavy toll traditional jewellery production has on the environment. Her solution was to extract precious metals from electronic waste — defined as any business or household generated waste containing circularity or electrical components, including mobile phones, which typically contain 0.2 grams of gold — and craft exquisite jewellery from it. Often these pieces will also feature lab-grown diamonds, or natural diamonds repurposed from dated, unworn jewellery. “We wholeheartedly believe the future of the sustainable jewellery is lab-grown and recycled antique diamonds,” says Walter.

A dditionally, Lylie offers customers the opportunity to recycle their hallmarked gold, platinum, or silver jewellery, for which they will be given a credit note to purchase a new piece from the brand. The value of this credit note is dependent on the value of the metal at the time of the exchange, as set by the London Bullion Market. That price fluctuates daily, so in a further effort to incentivise recycling, Lylie offers 7.5% above the metal’s market value.

“Our landfill sites are hidden goldmines,” states Walter. “If you were to mine one ton of the earth's ore, you would get a yield of under 30g of gold. If you were to mine one ton of e-waste, you would get a yield of 300g of gold. To extract the gold in e-waste, you have to access the mother board. This means other parts of the waste (ceramics, non-precious metals and plastics) are recovered, sorted and recycled in the process. Whilst its scale is daunting, e-waste offers an immense opportunity. Entrepreneurs, academics, and business leaders need to address the dismantling and re-use of e-waste components as an urgent concern."