Before you buy your honey that gorgeous piece of jewelry for Valentine's Day, you might want to consider some of the environmental and social issues surrounding the jewelry industry, especially diamonds and gold.Nodirtygold.org says that the production of one gold ring generates 20 tons of waste, and according to brilliantearth.com:
two-thirds of newly mined gold comes from open-pit mining rather than the more expensive alternative of underground shaft mines. To open these mines, companies must remove vast amounts of rock and materials and blast the entire site. This leads to the destruction of the environment at the mine site, damaging the surrounding ecosystem, and the opening up of vast craters.
Gold production can also taint the surrounding ecosystem with cyanide, which is used to extract the gold from the ore containing it. In regards to this practice, briliantearth.com notes that:
to dispose of the leftover ore contaminated with Cyanide and other toxins ("tailings"), a mine will create a dam which gets built up over the life of the mine. The gradual building of the dam generally causes the structure to be unsound. In the last 25 years, these dam failures have accounted for three-quarters of all major mining accidents. In 2000, a gold mine resulting from a tailings dam failure in Romania spilled more than 100,000 gallons of cyanide-laced mine waste into the Tisza river, killing 1,240 tons of fish and contaminating the drinking water supplies of 2.5 million people.
To get an almost too-vivid idea of what pit mining can do to the ecology of a country, I highly recommend reading Jack Hitt's "Island of the Damned" about the tiny island Nauru, which was printed in the July 2006 issue of The Sun magazine. Unfortunately, only an excerpt is available online, and that excerpt doesn't get to the tear-jerking, you-can't-believe-this-actually-happened descriptions of the island's almost total destruction, but perhaps the excerpt will be enough to convince you to purchase a back issue. In 2005, The New York Times did a very informative series on the gold trade that I would also recommend checking out.
In addition to the environmental destruction involved with gold mining, the diamond industry is responsible for causing a great deal of social strife. According to globalwitness.org, the diamond trade is responsible for the death and displacement of millions of people. The diamond trade has funded civil wars in many parts of Africa. These diamonds are exchanged in the international markets for weapons. I have not yet seen it, but the movie Blood Diamond highlights this issue by covering a civil war in Sierra Leone that took place throughout the nineties involving warlords trying to trade diamonds for money and other goods. Another social issue is the fact that many workers involved in the diamond trade, especially in the actual mining of the diamonds, are not even paid a dollar a day for the labor they do, despite the fact that mining is a notoriously dangerous profession.
Once you think about it, that beautiful piece of jewelry starts to become a symbol of death and destruction rather than undying love.
However, you don't have to resort to organic flowers or chocolate instead of something sparkly for your sweetie (although those are fine too!). Brilliantearth.com sells jewelry that does not compromise your ethics. They sell eco-friendly gold and conflict free diamonds. Right before Valentine's Day last year eight major retailers pledged to not support "dirty gold." The retailers are the Zale Corp., the Signet Group (the parent firm of Sterling and Kay Jewelers), Tiffany & Co., Helzberg Diamonds, Fortunoff, Cartier, Piaget, and Van Cleef & Arpels. Try to buy your gifts from one of these retailers.
Other more ethical jewelry retailers to check out:
1. Ten Thousand Villages offers fair trade jewelry from around the world.
2. Leber Jewelers carries conflict free diamonds.
3. Global Exchange has beautiful jewelry in many styles- not just gold and diamonds.
4. Fair Trade Federation member Mercado Global has gorgeous beaded jewelry from Guatemala.
Source: Natural Living at PennLive.com: Valentine's jewelry might not be so romantic after all
