With May bringing out the sunshine, summer dresses and the sparkly bling, I thought we could cover green jewellery this month, and I don’t mean Emerald rings, Jade bracelets or Malachite drop earrings… no I mean knowing where your stones / diamonds come from and how they were made, so your necklace doesn’t turn into a lodestone around your neck borne from funding some African insurgency with blood on their hands.
In case you missed the film starring Leo de Caprio, a ‘Blood Diamond’ – also called a converted diamond, conflict diamond, hot diamond, or a war diamond, refers to a diamond mined in a war zone and sold to finance an insurgency, invading army’s war efforts, or a warlord’s activity, usually in Africa.
Many dealers and retailers now abide by the Kimberley Process code. This supposedly protects you from unwittingly wearing conflict or blood stones. Earlier this year the code banned the sale of diamonds from Zimbabwe’s Marange mines due to dreadful conditions and the number of fatalities. Burmese rubies are also banned via international sanctions.
‘Ethical’ diamonds tend to come from countries like Canada or Australia. If you’ve got deep pockets you can push the bling boat out with diamonds from the Australian Rio Tinto Argyle mines.
Gold can take the gloss off its shine too on the ethical front. Its production is synonymous with intense poverty and ecological destruction (mining uses huge quantities of Cyanide). New Fairtrade and Fairminded gold standards guarantee the 100 million informal miners on small scale mines a proper price and set ecological standard – which without being biased (ok maybe a little) I would stick with Welsh gold, probably what Duffy was singing about in the song Big Flame.
Alternatively there are some progressive jewelers making fantastic pieces out of recycled glass, and other abundant materials – maybe part of the lesson is to value yourself not the cost of your accessories.
Posts Tagged ‘Go Green’
Green Jewellery
Wednesday, May 12th, 2010GREEN ISSUE THIS MONTH
Thursday, April 1st, 2010Being ethical and being green seems to have segued into a red top headline. What may be deemed a tiny whisper of a carbon footprint one day, can be charged with being a big clod hopping boot print the next.
Take surfing the net for example, all that petrol saved by working from home, all those trees saved by using electronic mail rather than the tangible paper kind, but hey guess what? Somewhere in California there are huge warehouses containing thousands of energy guzzling servers. Server farms provide the network to transmit websites. They are powered by electricity, predominantly from coal fired power stations, add in the energy required to make your PC in the first place and computing is responsible for 1 billion tonnes of CO2 each year – more emissions than aviation.
It also seems that the more immersed you become with an online life the greater your clod hopping carbon foot print. It is estimated that a Google search generates around 1g of C02. The more whistles and bells on the site the greater the footprint rising to 300mg of C02 per second for a site with video content and … running an avatar in second life uses more electricity than a live person in Brazil… Finally, in 2008 an estimated 62 trillion spam e-mails were sent globally, creating the same greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1million cars.
So where does this leave us? Pretty much the same place as always, employing words like discernment, intuition, and quiet time into your life. Just to ask yourself questions like Do I need to check my e-mails constantly throughout the day, rather than at the start and at the end? The same definitely applies to social networking and has web browsing become your new distraction to replace window shopping? Is second life misdirecting you from leading a fulfilling first life etc? I wouldn’t listen to the media as there is always a vested interest in controlling the public, the answer lies with being honest with yourself, and trusting that intuition will work out the perfect neat little footprint and not a carbon one like Sasquatch.
Could you join the 100 club?
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010Could you live without most of your worldly goods? As bloggers and Hollywood glitterati jump on the 100 Things bandwagon, I thought it would be a great start for the re-launch of MACS magazine.
American blogger Dave Bruno has pressed a button with the group consciousness when he decided to set out on his 100 Thing Challenge, in which he hoped that over 12 months he could de-clutter his life by paring down his possessions to just 100 personal items. He was fed-up with his family home being cluttered and it was a way of simplifying his life and making a small, personal protest against our consumer society.
Celebs followed, with Leonardo DiCaprio telling friends he’s trying to edit down his possessions to about 150 items, and other Hollywood mainstays like Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon are following suit.
The link to Dave Bruno’s blog is below, but I have always been a fan of de-cluttering and minimal living. As within so without I say, so if you horde and you keep consuming, that clutter that we live with surrounds us, seeps into our subconscious and our internal life can start mirroring the disorganised, gorged, cluttered and wasteful life we are witnessing in our homes.
As with everything you don’t have to take it all literally, the 100 thing suited Dave Bruno, it is using the process to discover what suits you – the very process of de-cluttering can bring unexpected thoughts and old emotions to the surface that can be very useful in gaining further understanding of what makes you tick.
GOING GREEN
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010Green used to obviously mostly just refer to the colour or a reference to the so called monster of jealousy; however in the noughties it has become an easy way to describe a wealth of environmental problems, solutions and ideas for living. Because it’s vague enough, “green” can be applied to seemingly disparate topics — anything from cleaning up a power plant to recycling your old bathwater.
Over the last couple of years, green, and all the issues it encompasses, got ramped up another notch. You probably saw newspapers, business journals and even food and fashion magazines (green makeup, anyone?) that splashed the word across their articles and titles.
So how did all this green awareness get going? Well, the warming of the planet is reason enough for many people to want to modify their behaviour or take interest in scientific and legislative solutions. But people have also begun to pay more attention to our unsustainable reliance on oil, the precarious state of our world water supply and the contentious roots of some of our favourite products. So every month in MACS magazine I will pull in a hot topic of ‘green’ awareness and hopefully the positive and altruistic aspects of what will ideally help shape our own lives and the life of the planet.
