Fine Living: When green jewelry is a good thing
Marin Independent-Journal, CA
When Matt and Bonita White were getting married four years ago, they looked for environmentally conscious wedding rings. These two Texans couldn’t find any, so they didn’t exchange any. Instead, they formed greenKarat, a small family-run company that uses mostly post-consumer gold and platinum to create wedding and commitment rings, custom and all-occasion jewelry.
“Wedding rings are a traditional symbol, but a lot of people haven’t found a way to buy rings that they feel good about,” says Matt White. “‘Greenies’ tend to examine their actions and their footprints in life through the green lens and, even if they weren’t aware of the gold or diamond issues, they probably Googled ‘environmentally responsible rings’ and found us.”
The gold and diamond issues he mentions include the large gold-mining pits in North America and Canada where, he says, “cyanide is poured in the basins to separate the gold from the rock. They say it doesn’t escape, but it does and it gets in the ecosystems and rivers.” Smaller operations include the 25 million people in other parts of the world, he says, who separate the gold by using mercury. The mercury is burned off with a torch, inhaled by the workers and absorbed into the environment where it
“ends up in your tuna.”
Diamond mining also has an environmental price. On the Ivory Coast, “it involves child labor and is used to fund civil wars,” he says. “In Canada, they bill their diamond-mining operations as environmentally aware but, instead, they’ve been trashing the environment. They mine in the permafrost area, which repairs slowly, if at all, and the streams are poisoned by the acid rock drainage.”
At greenKarat, new jewelry is created from what White calls “idle gold,” gold that sits idle in jewelry boxes, like class rings, broken chains and single earrings. After that, the new jewelry can be enhanced with recycled natural diamonds or synthetic diamonds and gemstones.
The key to solving the gold issue, says White, is making more post-consumer gold available, so soon the company will introduce a new program encouraging individuals and couples to contribute their own idle gold toward the creation of new jewelry such as wedding rings. “The gold will be refined of old alloys, distilled to pure gold and we’ll put fresh alloys in it.
“And ” he adds, “it will reduce the cost of the new piece.”
For details, call 800-330-4605 or visit www.greenkarat.com.
Fun-ctional Art
On your next weekend trip up the coast, stop in at Renga Arts on the main street – you can’t miss it, it’s called Main Street – of downtown Occidental (Sonoma County). I’d tell you that the downtown was so small it only had one stoplight, but there’s not even one of those, only a single stop sign. So, Renga Arts won’t be hard to find.
It’s a small store devoted exclusively to cleverly reused or reclaimed materials that now function as clever and artistic personal accessories or home and garden items. It’s a shop where you have to look twice at an item to really “get” it and, even then, you might need the explanatory help of the nearby identification labels provided by owners Joe Szuecs and his wife, Sherry Huss.
For instance, that retro wall clock on the wall or the sleek black bowl on the shelf are really a clock and a bowl, but in their past lives, they were jumpin’ on phonographs as favored rock or pop 45s or LPs.
The album covers themselves might be among those cut down and reused as memory-indulging sketchbook covers or note cards. That shoulder bag is really an assemblage of soda can pop-tops or vintage kimonos; a colorful bowl, rimmed in orange “admit one” tickets, is created from rolls of recycled carnival or movie tickets; and the elemental tea-candle holders or bright and flexible bottle openers are really old bike parts.
The couple, who opened the store three years ago, now feature 70 artisan vendors worldwide and offer about 200 products. Szuecs also sells his own rustic furniture and charming, copper-clad birdhouses crafted from recycled wood.
“We try to find things that are fun and inspiring,” he says. “Even if someone doesn’t want to buy something, but says ‘oh, I can do that,’ that’s fine. The ideas and inspiration are free.” Renga Arts is at 3605 Main Street in Occidental. For more information, call 707-874-9407 or visit www.rengaarts.com
PJ Bremier writes on home, garden, design and entertainment topics every Saturday. She may be contacted at pj@mindspring.com.
