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Ethical Jewellery Explained
Who doesn't like beautiful jewellery? Whether it's a diamond ring or an inexpensive beaded necklace, jewellery of all types is always in vogue. Just consider that in the US over $2bn is spent on jewellery for Mother's Day alone!
But there's a growing number of consumers who want to know that the jewellery they're wearing hasn't contributed to environmental damage or exploitation of artisans in developing countries.
This is what it is now called fair trade or ethical jewellery.
Let's face it: the production of jewellery around the world too often involves harmful exploitation of both natural and human resources.
Just witness the harmful effects of gold mining in countries like Peru, where cyanide is used to extract the gold, leading to untold environmental destruction. According to the Catholic international aid agency CAFOD, some open-pit gold mines have wreaked such destruction on the landscape that some are even visible from space. Check out No Dirty Gold for more information on the harmful effects of gold mining.
And let's not forget the sweatshop conditions of fast fashion jewellery manufacturing in so many parts of the world, where underpaid workers toil away under exploitative conditions.
How do you define 'fair'?
Now a new generation of ethical jewellery brands is changing all the old perceptions that ethical couldn't be stylish.
But what makes them 'fair'?
Here are the six principles underlying the new generation of fair trade jewellery labels:
1) The provenance of materials is hugely important. For precious metals, ethical jewellery brands are turning to cooperatively-run mines which avoid highly damaging mining practices. For diamonds, there's the 2003 Kimberley Process, which manages and certifies the international trade in diamonds to clamp down on the trade in 'conflict diamonds'. For other materials, fair trade jewellery designers are sourcing sustainable materials like recycled glass and sustainably-sourced seeds or wood offcuts to use in their jewellery.
2) Fair production prices: ethical jewellers pay fair wages commensurate with the local cost of living in the producer country. Most companies choose to work with producers in developing countries in order to help create work for skilled but marginalised producers. The bottom line is that your purchases literally help to create a better global trading system.
3) Investing in local communities: fair trade jewellery brands invest in their producers. This might include helping secure better workplace arrangements, to contributing towards training and capacity building, to helping to finance community projects like building schools or providing childcare facilities.
4) Direct relations with fair trade producers, which eliminate unnecessary or exploitative intermediaries. This means producers receive the direct benefits derived from selling to a wider marketplace, empowering them to re-invest in their work, lives and communities.
5) Transparency: ethically-minded customers are interested in where their purchases come from and who makes them. Fair trade jewellery brands are open about their production values, because they have nothing to hide. This means they open themselves to accreditation and certification bodes, who can audit what they claim to be doing.
6) Jewellery adds value. No-one's denigrating the value of fair trade commodity products, but there are limits to how much producers actually make from selling primary agricultural commodities like coffee beans. A coffee bean is only worth so much, while finished ethical jewellery can bring added-value to producers.
Ethical Jewellery - The Future
Of course, it helps that fair trade jewellery design is becoming more and more responsive to fashion trends, so that customers are buying items because they're desirable, and not just because they're associated with a good cause.
This focus on design and fashion will help the ethical jewellery sector to continue to grow in the future.
Who said style and ethics couldn't go hand in hand?
View Jungle Berry's extensive ranges of ethical jewellery, check out our media coverage, or read more about fair trade jewellery.
