It wasn’t so long ago that conversations about what “sustainable” meant in fine jewelry were murky at best, and downright convoluted and frustrating at worst. If you asked three different jewelry brands to define their sustainability policies, chances were you would get three different answers — none of them fully satisfying.
Using recycled gold, for example, might not always be sustainable, and while lab-grown diamonds tell a feel-good story by avoiding the human exploitation frequently associated with mining, what’s often not discussed is the energy consumption required to create those stones. Too often, claims of sustainability in jewelry have more to do with marketing than fact, and don’t hold up to scrutiny. There’s a word for such dubious claims of environmental virtue: greenwashing, coined in 1986 by American environmentalist Jay Westerveld to describe the deliberate misrepresentation of a practice’s true ecological cost.
Related Stories
...Keep reading this article on Hollywood Reporter.
