Taking the uncertainty surrounding this metal as a starting point and with the aim of providing useful resources on the road to more ethical and sustainable jewellery practices, the third edition of our Responsible Jewellery Dialogues focused on exploring the case of silver.
The webinar includes two conversations with Florian Harkort, precious metals supplier (Fairever, Germany), and Nidia Pérez (Cooperativa Multiactiva Agrominera Iquira, Colombia). It was hosted by Emilie Bliguet, Katja Jesek and Adriana Díaz H., activist jewellers of ORIGEN – Gold for Future, on our YouTube channel.
FLORIAN HARKORT
Florian Harkort is the founder and managing director of FAIREVER GmbH, a responsibly sourced precious metals supplier based in Leipzig, Germany. Their goal is to make gold & silver from responsible mining and fair trade better known and more easily available. In 2015, they became the first Fairtrade certified precious metals trader in Germany. In the same year, they launched the world’s first Fairtrade Gold Bars on the free market. Since 2016, they have been offering Fairtrade Gold Coins. Furthermore, since spring 2017, they are a Fairmined Authorized Supplier.
Dialogue in English with Spanish subtitles.
NIDIA PÉREZ
Nidia Pérez is a member of the Cooperativa Multiactiva Agrominera Iquira, in Colombia, along with her entire family. She is an environmental engineer and currently works as an operations coordinator in one of the processing plants, where her work focuses on carrying out the entire process of obtaining gold and silver, and mitigating related environmental impacts. This cooperative is the organization certified with the Fairmined fair mining standard that has the longest time on the label, since 2014.
Dialogue in Spanish with English subtitles.
A co-creation experience
The main contents of this edition of our Responsible Jewellery Dialogues were defined in a participatory way, including the questions and contributions of the people who joined the call to be part of a collective experience aimed at finding the answers we need most. However, in order to develop the issues that could not be included in this webinar, we continue investigating to delve into the socio-environmental effects of silver mining and the existing alternatives.
The Dialogues on Responsible Jewellery are a proposal by the ORIGEN – Gold for Future group to enhance knowledge about the challenges and possibilities of this approach to jewellery that claims its potential to make a positive impact on human rights, the environment and the well-being of mining communities. A commitment, this one regarding to responsible jewellery, which begins by moving towards ethical materials from responsible mining and fair trade circuits, traceable throughout their cycle.
