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Silver is back in the market spotlight, with the metal topping $50 an ounce — a level last reached in 1980. Prices are up 70 per cent this year, compared with about 55 per cent for gold. But silver is still the cheaper precious metal of the two and that is affecting jewellers’ approach and increasing scrutiny of how the metal is sourced.
At this year’s Goldsmiths’ Fair in London, the annual selling event for some of the UK’s best fine jewellers and contemporary silversmiths, the talk among exhibitors, says Ute Decker, was, “How can we use less gold?” Her work was on show at the fair and earlier this year she received the Initiatives in Art and Culture 2025 award for leadership in responsible practice in jewellery.
More silver was in evidence at the fair, as were jewellers using old and new ways of combining the two metals through, for example, the use of keum boo — the Korean technique of adding thin layers of gold to silver. But this renewed focus on silver is increasing the attention given to responsible sourcing.
Silver is often in gold’s shadow in terms of the information available on ethical sourcing. This is in part because approximately 70 per cent of the precious metal is mined as a byproduct of copper, gold, lead and zinc. In addition, more of the metal is used in industrial applications, such as electric vehicles and solar panels, than it is in jewellery.
According to the Canadian mining company Pan American Silver, one of the biggest silver miners, about 59 per cent of silver is used in industrial applications and only 21 per cent of the demand is for jewellery and silverware.
Yet silver mining, like gold mining, has found it hard to shake off controversy. Many of the arguments have played out in the past eight years around the Escobal silver mine in Guatemala, which has been owned by Pan American since 2019. In May, the parliament of the indigenous Xinka said no to the re-opening of the mine, citing “the failure of the Guatemalan government to guarantee their rights to a healthy environment, water, language, identity, culture and territory”. Pan American told the FT: “Pan American Silver is committed to operating ethically and to using sustainable business practices at all our sites, including environmental stewardship and collaborative relationships with local communities.”
As to the Escobal mine, the company points to “the extensive environmental management measures established at the mine and the monitoring of air and water quality, noise, biodiversity, and wastewater treatment systems”. But the situation remains unresolved.
Last month’s Chicago Responsible Jewelry Conference used one of its sessions to highlight what it described as the human rights and environment realities of silver mining. The conference organisers contention was that: “For the first time, the jewellery industry must confront that silver, a material so often used, often comes from mines at the centre of serious human rights and environmental justice struggles. Across the world, from the Xinka and Apache . . . to Quechua and Aymara fights in Peru and Bolivia . . . mining has meant dispossession, contamination and cultural loss. Silver from these contested regions circulates invisibly in global markets, leaving its impacts unaddressed by the jewellery sector until now.”
Many in the jewellery industry have embraced recycled silver as the answer to these complex issues — a greener alternative. But it is not always clear what “recycled” means. In the UK, Greg Valerio has been honoured for services to Fairtrade gold and artisanal gold mining communities in South America and Africa. He was also one of the first supporters of Fairtrade silver. He says if an item of jewellery is made using recycled silver, that can mean different things and different levels of oversight. “All the claims that are made by jewellers around recycling are unsubstantiated,” he says. “They ask you to trust them. That’s the first-party claim. The second-party claim is where you have an associated body. Say I am a member of the [UK] National Association of Jewellers . . . they then say yes, what that person is saying is correct. So it’s a vested interest claim. The third-party claim is a fully independent audit . . . Fairtrade gold or silver, for example.”
Desirée Binternagel is chief executive of Fairever, a leading German wholesaler of certified Fairtrade and Fairmined gold and silver. Her issue with the word recycled is that it implies that something has been reused that would otherwise have been waste. Yet actual waste, such as e-waste, comprises only a tiny proportion of recycled silver.
“Recycling can just refer to the left-over silver from the jewellery manufacturing process that is immediately reused,” she says. “Also [as to claims of being greener] the carbon footprint of the recycled metal is only calculated from when the scrap is delivered to the manufacturer. You have to look at the whole lifecycle of the product.”
Decker has worked hard to source precious metals ethically. “For some time recycled was the panacea, whether silver or gold,” she says. “But that bubble has burst a bit as the knowledge has seeped out that recycled isn’t necessarily the answer. I used recycled silver for the longest time, but they [my suppliers] said we can’t guarantee where our recycled silver ultimately comes from.”
She also tried to use Fairtrade silver, but “in the beginning it [the supply] was so patchy and so difficult and so much more expensive”, she says. The reason, as Binternagel explains, is that “as a byproduct of the Fairtrade gold mines, on average silver is only about 7 per cent of the production”. Decker now uses AgAIN silver, made by UK company Betts Metal from silver extracted from medical X-rays. “It is so nice to use AgAIN silver, which is a true kind of circular economy metal,” she says.