100% ethical gold

Introducing our low impact,

mercury-free gold

that empowers indigenous women miners

Mercury and cyanide are often used to extract gold from mines.

Does that sound dangerous to you? That's because it is.

What mercury poisoning can look like in humans:

Kidney failure
Memory loss
Mental confusion (like, Mad Hatter mad)
Tremors
Peeling skin
Gingivitis
For pregnant women, exposure can affect the baby's brain development, lead to premature birth, congenital defects and even miscarriage

The environmental impact of a gold mine is just as toxic, but it also lasts for generations.

In Indonesia, more than 10.5 million hectares of rainforest land is used for mining. That's 2.7 million football fields' worth of jungle being deforested each year.

The damage is long-lasting: once enough gold is extracted from a site, the mine is usually left abandoned without any rehabilitation or reforestation efforts.

Artisanal and small scale gold miners can use up to 17 times the amount of mercury as the gold they get. The Blacksmith Institute tested three primary rivers in Indonesian Borneo and found mercury levels 14.5 to 140 times higher than the EPA safety standard.

We need to clean up our act.

Starting from the source.

We partner with artisanal indigenous women miners in Indonesian Borneo. We pay them a premium for their pledge against the use of mercury and cyanide.

These women are our partners, not our employees – meaning they can make more profit for themselves on top of a stable income.

In 2019, we purchased 1,168 grams of gold from their panning. In the process, we avoided releasing an estimated 7 kilograms of mercury into the world.

This is Gardens of the Sun's 100% ethical gold from Borneo

traceability

We personally know everyone involved in our Borneo gold supply chain.

Everyone. Even their children. And their children’s children.

For example, we get our gold from Ibu Leni, her sister Priskila and her mom Ibu Gineng who send it directly from Central Kalimantan to our Bali studio.

minimum environmental impact

No cyanide. No mercury. No deforestation.

The indigenous women miners we partner with use low impact mining methods at abandoned mining sites. Once these women learned just how bad mercury was for their families, they were happy to stop using it.

MAXIMUM POSITIVE SOCIAL IMPACt

No child labor. No exploitation or modern slavery. Only good feels for you.

Poverty is all about the lack of opportunities. And the silencing of ambition. We try to help break the cycle by providing bi-annual scholarships for youth in our mining community.

LEGAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL EMPOWERMENT

Legal mining operations and micro-finance opportunities.

Working in the jungle means the rules can get a little wild. But when we cross our Ts and dot our Is, everyone is protected under a legal framework.

This means our partners can have peace of mind simply because our paperwork is up to date. We also purchase our gold at a premium price well over the village’s going rate.