Daintree National Park, North Queensland. Image © Can Stock Photo / lucidwaters
If you’ve seen this phrase before: “First, do no harm.”; it was probably something to do with the medical profession.
The Hippocratic Oath taken by medical professionals includes the promise to “abstain from doing harm”. This is basically a reminder to medical practitioners to avoid doing stuff that might make things worse for their patient.
This is good advice in most walks of life, not just if you’re a medico.
To put it in plain English … Which is better: To make a mess and have to clean it up, or to avoid making the mess in the first place?
Most people will say (when there’s a choice), the smart thing to do is not make the mess. Right?
Right.
Well, suppose for a moment we’re all medical practitioners and the planet Earth (including all the people on it) is our patient.
What’s better for our patient – do harm and then try to fix it, or do no harm in the first place?
We think the answer’s pretty obvious and our stance at Ethical Jewellery Australia (EJA) has always been, right from our humble beginnings in 2007, to do little or no harm in the first instance.
The reality is it’s truer to say ‘do less harm’.
The simple fact is, no matter how you approach it, there’s no way to make jewellery without making at least some mess.
Making and selling jewellery is always going to have some negative affects – at the very least consuming resources and generating greenhouse gases.
“Harm” of some kind is unavoidable if you want to own jewellery, but you do have a choice when it comes to how much harm.
Short of not making jewellery (which would be a bit silly in our line of business), the things we do specifically to minimise harm include:
The answer to this is: Individually, not much. But collectively, a lot.
As we explored in an earlier blog post about recycled vs mined precious metals, a simple yellow gold men’s wedding ring will contribute approximately 2kgs worth of greenhouse gas emissions if it’s made with recycled gold. But if made with mined gold, the CO2 contribution is more like 380kgs.
Weight-wise that’s something like 2 litres of milk vs 4 or 5 people. Picture that in your head!
A single ring could easily have a carbon cost of 500 to 1,000kgs in greenhouse gas emissions if the materials aren’t sourced carefully. Do you really want to be wearing that on your finger?
We all do a lot of little things in our everyday lives to help preserve the planet. Like sorting the recyclables to go into the bin, choosing ‘greener’ suppliers, buying locally-made when there’s a choice, taking your own bags when we go shopping and so on.
Individual actions like these don’t achieve much on their own, but when we all make the effort, we can make a difference.
What inspired me to write this post was an article I read recently by the US author, Anand Giridharadas, titled “America’s elites say they’re ‘changing the world.’ What they’re really doing is ruling it.”
The takeaway for me from this article was that for many in business (and in Government too I suspect), it’s far easier to do good, often unrelated things after the fact than it is to not make a mess in the first place.
How many organisations out there tick the ‘corporate responsibility box’ by loudly contributing to some charity or sponsoring some unrelated foundation to “do their bit”, rather than address the unsexy negative contributions their organisations make every day?
We think it’s a lot – and worse still, many don’t even bother to try and make good.
By the way, did you notice how many ads were on TV promoting various bank-sponsored rescue helicopter services and philanthropic foundations once the findings of the Banking Royal Commission hit the headlines?
This is not to diminish the charitable contributions many for-profit organisations make. They’re valuable and important. It’s just that they should be ‘as well as’, not ‘instead of’.
A lot of the time it takes a lot of effort to “do no harm” up front. It can often be tricky to find ethical suppliers, and the jewellery industry is no different.
Nonetheless we think it’s better to go that extra mile and avoiding creating a problem in the first place.
In fact, we think the effort is not only worth it, it’s mission critical.
It might not be very sexy, and it certainly doesn’t get us much free PR, but that’s not why we do it.
*We say ‘almost exclusively’ because, on occasion we will use Fair-mined gold when a customer requests it. But Fair-mined gold is the only exception.
References:
Ethical Jewellery Australia is an online engagement and wedding ring specialist. Every ring is custom designed and made to order.
We take our customers through the whole process from design to sourcing and finally to manufacturing.
All rings are handmade in Australia with recycled metals. (We can also supply Fair Trade gold if requested.)
Likewise, we only every use ethically sourced diamonds and gemstones. You can choose from Argyle, recycled, vintage and lab-grown diamonds, Australian, US, Fair Trade, recycled and lab-grown coloured gemstones.
By the way, we offer an Australia-wide service.
Or if you’d like to start by learning more about designing an engagement ring, download a free copy of our 70+ page design guide.
Benn co-authored the original Engagement Ring Design Guide in 2014 and edited the 2nd Edition in 2018. He is also the principal author of our wedding and commitment ring design guide.
His main responsibilities at EJA are business development and sales process management. Benn also creates technical drawings for our ring designs.
Ethical Jewellery Australia is an online, bespoke handmade jewellery company. We make any kind of…