Discover ethical jewellery Australia: handcrafted using recycled silver and gold, lab-grown and ethical gems. Sustainably made with love and care.
Every business has an environmental and ethical impact: a small, family run Australian jewellery business is no different. Plus of course creating jewellery has its own unique array of ethical issues and sustainability considerations.
At Simone Walsh Jewellery, we don't claim to be perfect but we do our best to create eco-friendly, sustainable and ethical jewellery in Australia. We believe that creating a sustainable and ethical business should always be a work in progress, so it's something we keep in mind every day.
Read on to learn about how we aim to make a difference in our small business - and also about how you can make more ethical choices when shopping.
Learn more about our Australian jewellery designer Simone Walsh and take a peek at our unique sterling silver jewellery, gold jewellery and gemstone jewellery. Also be sure to check out the most popular women's jewellery designs for inspiration.
How We Run an Eco-Friendly & Ethical Jewellery Brand
Here's a rundown of some of the ways that Simone Walsh Jewellery aims to make a difference by operating an eco-friendly, sustainable and ethical jewellery business in Australia:
- Recycled Jewellery: Our sustainable jewellery in Australia is primarily crafted with recycled sterling silver and gold, helping use to create ethical, eco-friendly jewellery that lasts. This includes sterling silver and solid gold jewellery. Recycled precious metals are exactly the same quality as newly mined metals.
- Recycling Precious Metals: All scrap metal left over from creating our handmade jewellery is collected for recycling. Gold and silver scrap is ultimately sent off to be melted down, refined and reused again (and again).
- Ethical Gemstones: We use gemstones in our jewellery designs. For stones which may otherwise have a high value and be ethically compromised, we aim to source simulated or lab grown gemstones as a more ethical alternative. As well as their environmental and ethical benefits, lab grown stones have a beautiful clarity and colour, yet are far less expensive. We do use natural gemstones as well, but generally less expensive ones which have fewer ethical issues associated with them. We always use ethical gemstone suppliers to source our stones. Note that we do not use natural diamonds due to widespread ethical concerns.
- Safer Chemicals: When selecting chemicals to use in our business we opt for sustainable, safer and/or lower impact alternatives whenever possible.
- Recycling & Composting Waste: Simone Walsh Jewellery recycles or composts any suitable materials generated by our business. In particular we compost our office paper in our worm farm (our worms are all named Warren and they thank you for any contributions you make!).
- Sourcing Eco-friendly Supplies: We seek to use recycled or otherwise eco-friendly products as much as we possibly can. In particular, read below for specific details about our jewellery packaging.
- Ethical Outsourcing: As our jewellery business has grown, we have partnered with an ethically run jewellery workshop in Indonesia which is staffed by highly skilled local artisans to create some of our components. This helps us to keep up with production demands and makes our intricate designs possible. We have personally visited this workshop to assess working conditions for ourselves.
- Choosing Ethical Suppliers: We preferentially use suppliers who work to lower their environmental impact and are generally socially responsible and ethical.
Sustainable jewellery Australia: packaging & shipping
Our packaging and shipping products and processes have been subject to a long process of improvement over many years in terms of being environmentally friendly and sustainble. We continue to work to find improvements where we can.
Here's a rundown of what we currently do:
Sustainable Packaging & Marketing Materials
- The mailing boxes we use for most orders are reusable, recyclable, biodegradable and compostable.
- Mailing boxes are secured with recyclable and compostable kraft paper packing tape and mailing labels are made of compostable thermal paper.
- Small non-jewellery items may be posted in a padded bag which is made from kraft paper and post-consumer recycled paper. These bags are both compostable and recyclable.
- The shredded paper we use for padding our mailing boxes is recyclable, compostable and biodegradable.
- Our jewellery gift boxes are made from recycled post-consumer waste. We encourage you to reuse them as they are great for storing your jewellery or other small items. If they no longer have a use, they can also be recycled, but remove any internal wadding first.
- The 100% cotton wool wadding used at the top of many of our gift boxes can be composted, but the bottom piece of poly wadding cannot: you will need to dispose of it as regular rubbish if you can't find a use for it (we're still looking for a solution to this issue).
- Any printed materials included with your order can be recycled. The 'thank you' card and packaging information card are both printed on recycled paper and can also be composted.
- If you buy small items such as earring backs or chain extenders they will come in small reused plastic ziplock bags which previously held some of our jewellery components. We encourage you to reuse them again if you can.
- Any soft plastic we do ship with your order (and there will generally be none or very little) can be recycled where accepted.
- We partner with Australia Post to ship our orders. Australia Post works hard to create better environmental and social outcomes as part of all parcels they ship.
Be a conscious consumer: shop for ethical jewellery in Australia
Ensuring the jewellery you purchase has sustainability and ethics in mind is one way to be a conscious consumer.
Be sure to do some research before you buy on how sustainable jewellery brands try to make a difference. Does it appear to be a genuinely ethical jewellery business? Where are their goods sourced from? What materials do they use? Do they take steps to make their packaging as ecofriendly as possible?
Shopping small from independent designers and small, local businesses is also a way that you can help to make the world a better place. It will shift some of your shopping away from everything you purchase being mass-produced - sometimes in very bad circumstances - and shipped in large quantities over long distances. It also means being supportive of people who are working for themselves in small and local businesses, which has all sorts of benefits in your community.
Read more about why you should aim to shop small, local and handmade, plus how to truly support independent designers.
More info about sustainability & ethics
Take a look at Fashion Revolution for information about supporting ethical fashion businesses in particular. Also visit the Ethics Centre (where Simone once worked in a previous life) for more information about ethics in daily life, including business.
Supporting businesses that are continually doing their best to make the world a better place (or at least not a worse one) is a very good thing to be doing.
Thank you so much for shopping small and supporting an eco-friendly and ethical jewellery business like ours.