Sustainable jewelry may not have much to do with your jewelry making right now, but it is a trend to keep an eye on.
I have heard about sustainable jewelry before, but today I found something that really surprised me.
A major retailer the likes of Walmart is offering sustainable jewelry as one of its product lines.
The new line is called Love, Earth jewelry.
This is part of Walmart’s push to become a more environmentally friendly company. I think it is a significant trend because as the largest retailer in the world by far, other retailers watch what Walmart does.
If they have some success with this line you can expect to see other companies follow suit.
So when they say sustainable jewelry, what do they mean exactly?
The whole idea is that there are multiple steps in the jewelry making process (mining, refining, polishing, cutting, and manufacturing) that have an impact on the environment.
Of course, that impact could be positive, neutral, or negative.
Walmart established what it calls a Jewelry Sustainable Value Network to ensure that jewelry produced for the Love, Earth line has a reduced negative impact on the environment.
It established a set of criteria for mining and metals that it encourages its suppliers to adhere to.
Part of that process is to give each customer of Love, Earth jewelry the opportunity to trace the production process of each piece of jewelry all the way back to the very first steps.
When you buy the jewelry you simply use the ID tag and go to a website and enter the number and the site displays a record of the jewelry’s production history.
What intrigues me about this is if it becomes a long term trend where all jewelry consumers expect the retailer to prove that the jewelry they bought was produced without having a negative impact on the environment, that consumer expectation will eventually make its way into handcrafted jewelry as well.
If you want to read more about this you can visit this website: http://www.loveearthinfo.com/
Here is a video where you can see some of the Love, Earth jewelry line.
