Eco Lesbo Vego

Recycle: Ethical Metals

I like to wear silver jewellery. I don’t really mind much what it’s made of – but it needs to be silver-coloured. Some people prefer gold. I’m just a silver person. Of course, silver-coloured jewellery is made of metal. Yeah, you can get the plastic silver-coloured, but um… yeah. Really no.

Metal is natural, so that’s great! Go eco, go! Right?

Not so much.

Wouldn't it be great if they were made from recycled metal?

The process required to extract that metal from the earth is incredibly damaging to the environment. This is slowly becoming more and more well known. A few years ago, the ‘no dirty gold‘ campaign was introduced, encouraging people to buy only sustainably mined gold. The campaign was just the tip of the iceberg though, as not just gold but lots of other metals are mined unsustainably around the world. Don’t think the metals are just used in jewellery though. Metals are used in lots of things – gold thread in beautiful dresses, remote controls, mobile phones and other similar devices. And those are just the highest impact metals.People and companies are increasingly offering advice and alternatives which enable you to avoid metal mined in environmentally damaging ways. Almost all of them include recycling the metals we’ve already mined.

• You can recycle your mobile phone, as discussed in last week’s Recycle post.
• You can buy jewellery made with recycled metal.
• You can recycle lead from old car batteries. Service stations and car battery retail outlets will generally accept car batteries for trade-in. Be careful though – don’t empty out battery acid before taking the batteries for recycling.
• Scrap metal recyclers can take copper pipes, hot water systems, car bodies, metal appliances and other metals to be recycled.
• Remember kerbside recycling – putting cans into your regular recycling bin means the metal can be reused to create other cans, fridges and all sorts of other things.

To learn more about how metal mining damages the environment, check out this site or this one.

Note: The image of the rings is from Love and Pride.

January 29, 2009 at 12:05 am 1 comment