Good as Gold?
Anyone else notice how heterosexist and good-ol’-fashioned-sexist Valentine’s Day and Christmas ads are? (Kay Jeweler’s, I’m looking at you.) They make women look like feral, ravenous vagina dentatas who can’t hear your heartfelt declarations of love over the din of their gold digging and diamond grasping.
The lure of gold is as old as civilization. But pickaxes soon gave way to more-sophisticated mining techniques, which leave in their wake, millions of gallons of toxic waste. Besides blighting our landscapes, thoughtless mining practices also drive indigenous populations from their homes. Mining, for instance, displaced more than 30,000 people in Ghana’s Tarkwa District between 1990 and 1998,
According to The New York Times in its “The Cost of Gold” series:
Consider a ring. For that one ounce of gold, miners dig up and haul away 30 tons of rock and sprinkle it with diluted cyanide, which separates the gold from the rock. Before they are through, miners at some of the largest mines move a half million tons of earth a day, pile it in mounds that can rival the Great Pyramids, and drizzle the ore with the poisonous solution for years. …
According to the Times, some metal mines, including gold ones, have become the “near-equivalent of nuclear waste dumps that must be tended in perpetuity.”
Hard-rock mining generates more toxic waste than any other industry in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The agency estimated last year that the cost of cleaning up metal mines could reach $54 billion.
According to a study by the United States Geological Survey in 2000, to which the Times refers, cyanide can transmute into other toxic forms that are long-lived. Plus, other harmful metals are released as cyanide dissolves gold out tof the rock.
Mining with cyanide isn’t the only option, but it’s widely considered to be the most cost effective, especially in light of thin profit margins (at least, according to the miners) and gold’s increasing scarcity.
Oxfam America and Earthworks have banded together to launch a campaign against these mining practices. A PBS documentary, “The Curse of Inca Gold,” was also produced in conjunction with the Times series.
Until gold-mining undergoes serious reforms, Greenlight magazine has some tips on what we can do:
- Recycle old jewelry. Ask your jeweler to refer you to a metal smith who can melt down pieces you no longer wear and refine the gold again for use.
- Support jewelers that use recycled metals. GreenKarat.com is a well-known eco-jeweler (they even use lab-grown gems), but some everyday jewelers buy gold that’s been re-refined by metal smiths.
- Buy antique or vintage jewelry. Take away some of the demand for new gold by seeking out unique heritage pieces.
I also found Touchwood Rings via City Hippy, something I wish I had known about when the hub and I were shopping for wedding rings last year. Made from wood gathered from blown-down or bug-killed trees on Touchwood’s 50 acres of land, or scrap and surplus wood from wood shops and factories, the rings are derived from 14 different woods, including cherry, ash, and honey walnut—you can even do the schmoopy thing of having a contrasting wood inlaid with another to exemplify your union.
