100 % Traceability in the electroplating of gold with Fairmined certified plating solutions
The Fairmined initiative is a robust standard that transforms mining into an active force for good, ensuring social development and environmental protection among its participants. With this initiative, every single actor in the supply chain has a specific role to cover, and the participants are categorized as miners, first authorized buyers, and licensees. These actors in the supply chain have specific rules to execute before they can be certified, a certification process that is carried out by an independent third-party audit company.
The main chemical used in the gold electroplating process is called gold potassium cyanide (K[Au(CN)2]. This chemical is used in various industries ranging from medical, aerospace, electronics, telecommunications, numismatics, and jewelry. When using Fairmined gold potassium cyanide for the gold electroplating process, the customer has complete access and can trace the gold directly from the mine. The short supply chain and periodic third-party audits make the supply chain extremely agile and easy to verify. The problems of complex and long supply chains in which traceability is completely lost are solved by the Fairmined standard. Transparency is a special attribute related to Fairmined gold; at Alloy, we have a policy to completely disclose where we source our Fairmined gold. We send our customers the original certificates of origin audited by Colombia’s mining authority, and the Fairmined initiative has very strict and robust technological software for traceability. The software, named Fairmined connect, records the transactions of every gram of Fairmined gold for traceability and audit purposes. Transparency makes this whole supply chain accountable—something that is very important in the world we live today.
About 5 years ago, our company conducted a survey with the help of the Bogotá Chamber of Commerce to determine the type of gold that the jewelry companies in Bogotá wanted to source. About 90% of the participants voted for sourcing the gold from ASM mines. Their main argument was that sourcing recycled gold was closely related to pawn shops. Pawn shops in Colombia usually don’t have the best practices or reputation as they are often associated with stolen goods, profiting from the financial needs of people and usually operating informally. The jewelry companies in Bogota don’t want to have any association with pawn shops. The story is completely different in developed countries where the word “recycle” and its aura are used to erase the pawn shop nature of this type of gold.
Leading jewelry certifications use persuasive words to imply that their entire supply chain is certified and that there is a chain of custody in the entire supply chain. Once you investigate the details of the certification, however, you will find that only the two final actors in the supply chain are identified and only the last actor of the supply chain is audited—which is the refiner usually based in a developed country. What happens to the rest of the supply chain? Are melted gold bars allowed in any part of the supply chain? Can we truly know the origin of this supposedly recycled gold? There are more questions than answers regarding the use of recycled gold.
Fairmined gold is the best choice in the market if you want to source from an ethical, transparent, responsible source—one source that allows you to make confident claims about the origin of your gold.
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