A New Definition of Sustainable

I was surprised to find the word "sustainable" missing from my dictionary.  I'm not joking.  All the pages are intact, but my battered Oxford Concise Dictionary from school goes straight from "sustain" to "sustenance". I had to look online for a definition. Remarkable, isn't it, that something that didn't even exist as a word back in 1977 is now a global concern.  Most world leaders (with a few notable exceptions) have been flocking to the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow in recent days, such is their concern about "using natural products and energy in a way that does not harm the environment". (That's the new dictionary definition of sustainable).

The diamond industry recognizes the importance of sustainability, and so do its consumers. Just look at the report published a couple of weeks ago by De Beers which claimed more than half of all diamond buyers would pay extra (up to 20 per cent in some cases) to be certain their purchase had a guarantee of sustainability. But elsewhere in the jewelry world it is hard to give such guarantees.  I'm talking about gemstones. Policing the diamond supply chain may not be easy, but gemstones is, literally, a minefield. Diamonds are dominated by a small number of big miners. Not so the production of gemstones. Governments, industry bodies and consumers may want their sapphires, rubies and emeralds to come with the same sustainability guarantees as diamonds.  But an estimated 80 per cent  of the world's colored gemstones - are dug out of the ground by artisanal miners. That's a term that can cover anything from a mother and her daughters peacefully mining tiger's eye quartz in South Africa's Northern Cape to armed bandits plundering private emerald mines in Colombia.  But whatever kind of artisans they are, there's a lot of them.  In Brazil there are reckoned to be over half a million artisanal and small-scale miners. They recover tourmalines, topaz, opals, quartz and other gemstones using hammers and chisels. In China there are over a million, according to a new report by The Gemstones and Jewellery Community Platform (GJCP) called  Hands That Dig, Hands That Feed: Lives Shaped by Coloured Gemstone Mining. There are another 500,000 in Zimbabwe and Madagascar, 100,000 in Mozambique.  The vast majority of those mentioned, and many others around the world, are mining land that isn't theirs, without regulation, intervention or oversight, using methods that have barely changed since the 1880s and with scant regard for whatever damage they may do to the environment.

The diamond industry has grown exponentially since the dys of Cecil Rhodes.  But little has changed in gemstones. "This unchanging state is largely a result of fundamental mineral economics, says the GJCP report cited above. "Recovering and selling rough coloured gemstones in large volumes has never been considered profitable enough to interest large-scale commercial enterprises or investors. Until now."
The tables are turning. In the case of emeralds and rubies - two of the "big three" precious gemstones - big corporations now dominate their production. British miner Gemfields supplies as much 30 per cent of the world's emeralds from its Kagem mine in northern Zambia, and only this week announced the recovery there of a monster 7,525-ct gemstone. Newly-democratic Myanmar was moving towards industrialized jade mining (it accounts for 90 per cent of global output) until its recent difficulties.

Such moves represent a double-edged sword.  Big companies make more mess, but are more likely to clear it up.  At the very least they're more identifiable and therefore accountable.  Meanwhile, millions of "unofficial" miners armed with pickaxes instead of bulldozers, do less damage . . .  but don't get caught. Big companies all the way along the gemstone pipeline acknowledge that they have a reputation to protect. Even if they don't feel sustainable they know they need to show it. The primary concern of the unofficial miners is putting food on the table. As the GJCP report says: "One group wants more security and to sell more. The other wants to have choice among suppliers, all compliant, hoping to immunize against controversy. Either way, bringing sustainability to an industry like gemstones ain't going to be easy.

Have a fabulous weekend.