A Chain of Gold

The Oro Verde ® gold for the Green Gold exhibition was collected by the Community Council from a certified productive family unit. Purchases of gold and platinum occur both at the mines and at the urban centre of the municipality, depending on the local dynamics of each community.

Luis Alfredo Hurtado is the man in charge of buying and selling Oro Verde ® gold.

Cleaned and prepared locally, the gold and platinum is sent to Medellín, where the gold is refined by a local refinery. For transport purposes, Oro Verde ® has established an alliance with a national refinery who, as part of their social responsibility policy, offers the Programme its transport, security and refining platform. At all times the traceability of Oro Verde ® is respected. Oro Verde ® is packed, stored and refined apart from other metals.

The programme then sells and ships the metals to final clients. Receiving the 40g of gold from Oro Verde ®, the question was now what to alloy it with. 24ct gold is very soft and malleable, so for jewellery purposes it is often mixed with silver and copper to make it more durable. The 24ct fair trade and ecological gold from Oro Verde® deserved to be alloyed with metals of a similar integrity. As certified, responsibly mined silver and copper is not yet available on the market, recycled or ‘renewed’ metals proved to be the answer. I approached UK company Cred Sources, who are the first to supply recycled silver and fair trade gold to jewellers. They added their recycled fine silver to my high quality copper wire and created a sheet of 18ct yellow gold for us to work with.