Photograph by Brian Finke / Kintzing
Words by Sara R. Radin
At jewelry counters in Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai, and Los Angeles, shoppers have been lining up for gold. Over the past year, its price climbed to record highs exceeding $4,000 per ounce as investors sought stability amid inflation and geopolitical tension, and concerns about the long-term reliability of the dollar. Central banks have joined in, hoarding more gold than at any time since the Cold War.
But gold’s reputation as a safe investment is built on extraction practices that are anything but safe for the environment. Most gold today is produced through industrial-scale mining that generates enormous volumes of toxic waste.
To separate microscopic flecks of gold from surrounding rock, miners blast open mountains, crush the ore, and treat it with cyanide or mercury to draw out the precious metal. The process leaves behind a toxic slurry known as tailings, billions of tons of which are stored in ponds or dams that often leak or collapse. In the Amazon, mercury from artisanal mines has polluted rivers and entered the food chain; in Africa, industrial mines have caused cyanide spills that wiped out aquatic life in a matter of hours. Even the best-managed mines leave behind tailings that remain hazardous for generations.
“It takes three metric tons of waste to produce a single gram of gold,” said Jan Morrill, tailings campaign manager at Earthworks. “Because of all this waste, gold mining is really about waste management—and most of that waste remains toxic forever.”
Those impacts have spurred a growing push to change how gold is sourced. For jewelry designer Daniella Samper, the realities of mining’s waste and traceability problems became impossible to ignore when she started building her brand. “There’s a misconception that ‘recycled gold’ is the ethical answer,” she says. “‘Recycled’ could be gold mined last month. It’s just shop scraps. You can’t trace labor conditions, mercury use, or whether it came from illegal mining.”
Her perspective shifted after visiting Fairmined-certified, small-scale mines in Colombia and Peru, operations that looked markedly different from large industrial pits or the informal river dredges common across the Global South. “I saw mercury elimination, water recycling, and real land rehabilitation,” she said. Workers wore protective gear while mine managers discussed traceability and community investment openly. “The premium we pay funds safer workplaces and environmental protections.”
“It takes three metric tons of waste to produce a single gram of gold. Because of all this waste, gold mining is really about waste management—and most of that waste remains toxic forever.”
Samper sees Fairmined as a credible option for small-scale gold because of its on-site accountability requirements, though she notes that the certification’s reach is still limited.
Schemes like Fairmined, Fairtrade Gold, and the Responsible Jewellery Council have become central to efforts to reform the gold supply chain. All aim to establish verifiable custody, requiring audits of labor practices, chemical use, and environmental safeguards. For artisanal miners, certification can offer access to formal markets and price premiums that help fund safer methods and community projects. Participation, however, is uneven. Independent audits can be costly, and standards vary widely. Some certification systems rely on company-hired consultants or self-reporting, while smaller operators, particularly in the Global South, may lack the resources to meet the requirements.
Meanwhile, the wider industry continues to produce staggering volumes of waste. “These facilities can hold hundreds of millions of cubic meters,” Morrill said. “Failures are becoming more frequent and more severe.” When the Mount Polley dam burst in British Columbia in 2014, it released 25 million cubic meters of waste into a salmon watershed. “Environmental impacts have human rights impacts,” she added. “Polluted water and air threaten health and livelihoods.”
Recycling could provide part of the solution. Recycled gold refers to metal reclaimed from existing sources, such as old jewelry or industrial components, and refined back to its pure form. Morrill notes that recycled gold could technically meet all of the world’s technological demand and almost half of its jewelry demand. “Most newly mined gold ends up in jewelry boxes or bank vaults,” she said. “We don’t actually need more of it.”
Still, those in the industry caution that recycling is not a cure-all. It cannot address existing labor abuses, nor the environmental damage from past mining; and because most recycled gold comes from relatively recent sources, it can still reflect the same opaque supply chains reformers are trying to change.
In response, some jewelers now source directly from small-scale miners they know personally. “Most of our gold comes from my open-pit operation, which runs May through October,” Todd Bracken, a bench jeweler and miner in California, said. “I’ve got claims on my own property, and I buy production on the spot from a network of small miners, usually right at the river.”
“The mining industry can’t be trusted to write its own rules. We need strong laws and enforcement, not voluntary promises. We need updated legislation that requires the consent of Indigenous peoples.”
On his workbench, a small, irregular nugget sits among Bracken’s tools. “This is what natural gold looks like—straight from the river,” he said. Larger nuggets are sold as collectors’ pieces, he explained, while the finer dust is melted down into bars. For Bracken, that physical proximity to the source is part of the appeal. “People respond to seeing the actual nuggets and understanding exactly where that metal came from.”
Still, scale does not guarantee less harm. “Impacts from artisanal mining can be significant on water [and] on Indigenous rights,” Morrill said. “Transparency and strong rules matter no matter the size of the operation.” In many regions, small-scale miners work on or near Indigenous lands without formal consent, creating tensions over access, land tenure, and the stewardship of rivers and forests central to cultural survival.
That’s where regulation comes in. “The mining industry can’t be trusted to write its own rules,” Morrill said. “We need strong laws and enforcement, not voluntary promises.” The United States still operates under an 1872 federal mining law, which allows companies to extract minerals on public lands without paying royalties.“We need updated legislation that requires the consent of Indigenous peoples,” she added.
In many mining regions, Indigenous communities are still working to defend ancestral lands where access to clean water and intact ecosystems underpins cultural continuity and local governance. Advocates argue that any approach to “ethical gold” must begin with recognizing Indigenous land rights and ensuring free, prior, and informed consent, with communities able to decline mining altogether.
With stronger policy support, more mines could adopt higher safety and traceability standards and make responsibly sourced gold more widely accessible. But even the most rigorous mining practices cannot eliminate the industry’s fundamental footprint. “What’s really striking [about this industry] is the contrast of how mining can get so ugly to produce something so beautiful, which is jewelry,” said Samper. “The way forward is to keep advocating for better regulation; to keep talking about it and educating our customers so that they know they’re buying a metal that was not extracted under terrible conditions.”
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The Long Work of Making Gold More Responsible
