Filed under: gold jewelry | Tags: gold, green living, jewelry, mining, Valentine's Day
With Valentine’s Day only days away, I know a lot of people who are trying to come up with last minute ideas to make their honey happy. And, then there are those who have planned well in advance because they are going to spring the big question on their loved one and they have a nice piece of jewelry picked out just for the occasion.
For those looking for ways to show their love and affection and who want to do it in a way that doesn’t make someone else’s life a little less good (the person who made the product in some country far, far away), there are soooo many great choices these days!
For this blog post, I want to focus on gold jewelry since Valentine’s Day is the number two holiday for jewelry sales (and the upcoming Olympics in Whistler also has me thinking of gold!). My story begins when my husband asked to marry me way back when I was doing a public education project on hard rock mining. It was a classic dirty industry back then, with lots of bad side effects attributed to mines — pollution in nearby rivers, boom and bust local economies, mining companies getting out of town without cleaning up their messes, and the list goes on.
So, when my husband and I discussed ring shopping, I couldn’t see us buying new gold rings. But, I wanted us to wear rings to show our commitment to each other. What to do? My father had passed on to me my mother’s jewelry and to this day I happily wear one of my mother’s diamond-studded gold rings as my wedding ring.
So, you may not have that option…the good news is that the No Dirty Gold campaign has brought us a long ways from the choices consumers had ten years ago. More than 60 jewelry companies, including Sears, Herff Jones, and Tiffany & Co., have committed to purchase cleaner sources of gold by endorsing the “Golden Rules,” a set of principles for more responsible mining. These companies are calling on the mining industry, one of the world’s dirtiest , to move away from current practices that harm local communities and generate millions of tons of toxic waste. Give these folks a gold medal!
And that is news that warms my heart on Valentine’s Day!
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