The Precious Jewelry Circle
In many areas, second-hand goods have become an integral part of our lives.
The circular economy is our future and more and more of you are favouring different forms of recycling and reuse in your daily lives.
For Gemme, this has been a given since 1985!
Through second-hand jewelry, we give a second life to your gold and jewelry in more ways than one.
- Our renovation work may involve cleaning, checking, polishing, rhodium-plating, setting or restoring damaged parts of second-hand 18-carat gold jewelry, or replacing a lost or damaged stone.
We handle 100% of these tasks in our own workshop, or in a handful of workshops located in Lyon intra-muros, close to our boutiques. This local loop, which is unique in France, enables us to offer you the benefit of our artisanal know-how.
- When we buy back "old" gold, or second-hand gold jewelry that is too damaged to be restored, we entrust the "trifle gold" to our refining partners.
These are specialists in precious metals, who melt the scrap, mainly 18-carat gold, to make pure gold and resell it as components or raw materials for jewelry, investment gold or fine gold for other industries.
Gold cannot be lost and can be recycled ad infinitum.
As a result, our second-hand jewelry business and the sale of second-hand 18-carat gold jewelry are part of an economy that consumes very little energy, around 20 times less than that of new jewelry.
A Virtuous and Precious Circle!
Our CO2 impact
Over and above the usual rhetoric about the advantages of second-hand jewelry, Gemme has collaborated with Greenly, a specialist in carbon footprints, to assess the environmental impact of our refurbished second-hand jewelry, compared with that of new jewelry made from mined raw materials.
This study is based on various ECOINVENT assessments, in particular those concerning the extraction and processing of gold, and the extraction and cutting of diamonds. It also analyses the various types of consumption linked to the purchase, renovation and resale of second-hand jewelry.
It has been established that the transformation of jewelry by Gemme has a very low carbon impact, at 6 kg of CO2 per piece of jewelry renovated. In comparison, a new piece of jewelry, comprising 2g of gold and a 0.3 carat diamond, would have a carbon footprint of 139kg of CO2, or 23 times more than the same piece of jewelry renovated by Gemme.
Another example: an all-gold necklace containing 13g of 750/1000 gold would have a carbon footprint of 630kg, more than 100 times that of the same piece of jewelry second-hand at Gemme.
Clearly, gold and diamond mining has a considerable environmental impact, not only in terms of emissions, but also due to other externalities:
- Use of mercury, a heavy metal that can pollute water and soil, and spread through the food chain.
- Significant consumption of sulphur oxide (1 kg of sulphur oxide per g of gold), which contributes to acid rain.
- Production of 1 tonne of mining waste.
- Consumption of 2,500 litres of water per g of fine gold.
Giving our jewelry a second life also means contributing to a sensible consumption model!
