CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts – Pandora, known for its affordable sterling silver charm bracelets, is the world’s largest jewellery company by volume: The Danish chain sells more than 100 million pieces annually. This week, it announced that it is now sourcing only 100 per cent recycled silver and gold for its collections.

The move was touted as an important step by a massive company to reduce its environmental footprint.

“We wanted to lead by example,” Pandora chief executive Alexander Lacik said in an interview. “If we can make positive contributions to society through our use of recycled gold and silver, it means anyone can do it.”

By working with metals that have already been mined, Pandora will not be digging deeper in search of new materials, allowing the company to substantially reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

Mining requires more energy and resources than recycling and is a leading source of mercury pollution. In a 2020 news release announcing its shift to recycled metals, Pandora cited statistics from the World Gold Council and other entities showing that the process of recycling gold reduces emissions by about 99 per cent compared with mining it, while recycling silver reduces carbon emissions by about 66 per cent compared with mining it.

Other brands, like Prada and Monica Vinader, have also started using recycled metals. But some industry observers warn that those materials can seem more virtuous than they may really be.

Like “sustainability”, the word “recycled” can mean different things to different people. This interpretation gap can prove problematic, said Ms Tiffany Stevens, CEO of the Jewellers Vigilance Committee, an organisation in New York City that focuses on ethics and policy advocacy in the industry.

“Recycled is a positive modifier in most contexts, but that isn’t necessarily the case when it comes to gold or silver,” she said. The term “recycled”, she added, gives jewellery made with such materials a “green halo” or an aura of being environmentally friendly.

But the term does not “give people any clear answers about where their metals came from”, Ms Stevens said, which is a reason her organisation and others have asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to disallow the use of “recycled” to describe jewellery products sold in the United States. The FTC is expected to respond in 2024 when it releases updates to its environmental marketing guidelines.

Those guidelines currently say that “it is deceptive to represent, directly or by implication, that an item contains recycled content unless it is composed of materials that have been recovered or otherwise diverted from the waste stream”. Precious metals are generally not considered waste, however, because they have been melted and reused for centuries and typically retain their value.

The term “recycled” can also obscure the origins of some metals, like those sourced by so-called cowboy miners, or outlaw refiners known for using child labour or running operations that fund the activities of criminal networks.

Mr Patrick Schein, a refiner and a board member at advocacy group Alliance for Responsible Mining, said the word can create the illusion that the recycling process always yields “newly born gold that is ethically acceptable”.

The group has promoted other ways to improve the jewellery industry’s supply chains, including for companies to support programmes by groups like the Swiss Better Gold Association, which works with small-scale miners refining metals more responsibly.

Mr Lacik said the shift to sourcing only recycled metals at Pandora is based more on environmental factors than on how it might affect small-scale miners, a group that produces nearly two-fifths of the world’s mercury pollution, according to a 2018 United Nations report.

“You have to decide: Is the climate topic more or less important than particular communities?” he said. “In our case, we think that getting hold of the climate issue and moving progress forward is a bigger topic for humanity in the long run.”

While using recycled metals might reduce the environmental footprint of Pandora, the mining of new gold and silver has not slowed over the past decade, suggesting that companies’ growing interest in such materials has done little to offset the overall climate footprint of mining.

Pandora plans to pay about US$10 million (S$13.4 million) annually for recycled metals. This is more than it was paying for newly mined ones, Mr Lacik said, “but that is a cost we are willing to absorb”.

“I’m also realistic about how important this is to jewellery shoppers,” he added, noting that most are driven by two main factors: design and price. “Some might then ask about sustainable production – but not many.” NYTIMES