Other Materials
So far, we’ve concentrated on the impact of making a pair of Simple Earrings and getting them to the final customer - hopefully you . That’s reasonable, given that these earrings are by far our most popular items. However, other pieces of jewelry contain some additional materials we haven’t yet discussed.

Necklace Chains
Given that we know the silver in our earrings is more wasteful than any other component (paper, glass, printing or rubber), necklace chains are the elephant in the room. There are 0.54 grams of silver in a pair of Simple Earrings, but the 18″ (un-recycled) silver chain we used to use for pendants weighs just over 3 grams - that’s a lot of emissions and energy use from silver! That silver chain was also our most expensive material, forcing us to price our pendants higher than many people were willing to pay.

For all these reasons, we decided to switch away from sterling silver chains to silver colored Beadalon® cable. Coming soon: what I can find out about the environmental impact of Beadalon® cable.

Base Metal
The other additional materials in our pendants are the clasp, crimp bead, and crimp cover, all of which are made of ’silver-plated base metal’. I couldn’t find exact information about the base metal, but it is either brass, tin or copper. We’ll get into this in a later post as well.

Memory Wire & Beads
The last materials in our products are the memory wire and hematite beads used in our wine glass identifying charms. I’m going to have to do some research and get back to you on these two materials as well in future posts.

Surgical Stainless Steel
Our body jewelry uses surgical stainless steel findings. Stainless steel (even surgical stainless steel) contains 60-100% recycled content [PDF source] and is infinitely recyclable. The entire stainless steel industry emits 6.12 million tons CO2 per year while producing 25.9 million tons of stainless steel. Our stainless steel body jewelry findings weigh 0.95 grams per item. This means that for every 1000 pieces of body jewelry we make, roughly 0.52 lbs of CO2 are produced in making the stainless steel findings.

It looks like I’ve got lots of research to do.

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Example of a Prop 65 warning label Recently, a California store expressed interest in carrying Sundrops if we could say our jewelry complies with the state’s Proposition 65 (the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986). Prop 65 lists twenty-one pages of chemicals known to cause cancer, and is the reason for the tags you sometimes see on appliance cords and many other things.
The Good News
Lead was the easy one; most items are labeled if they contain lead. Figuring out whether any of the other myriad of proscribed chemicals were present was much more difficult. I spent a few solid days searching the internet, sending emails to the makers of materials we use, and chatting online with the primary middleman from whom we purchase most of our jewelry findings (ear hooks, wire, necklace cord, etc) to get either the list of materials in each item or the maker’s declaration that the item complies with Prop 65. However, I can now happily say that all of our jewelry findings are in compliance with Prop. 65. This does not necessarily mean that they contain no chemicals listed in those 21 pages, it just means that any of those chemicals are present in low enough concentrations to not require a warning label.

That list, by the way? It was rather less helpful than it could be - it doesn’t list what the allowable levels are for each chemical, which was irritating to me from two perspectives:

• as a business owner, it was very difficult to determine whether my product is allowable
• as a person wanting to be protected from these chemicals, I don’t know what levels are considered safe

The Bad News
While our jewelry findings are clean, not all of our glass is. Two of the roughly 20 colors of stained glass we have used contain lead. Lead in glass jewelry is not actually a health hazard to those wearing the jewelry (lead in glass can’t leach the way metallic lead can), although it still has to carry the warning label. The potential health hazard is for us, the people melting the glass. Although the lead is trapped inside the glass when solid, melting releases toxic lead fumes. Even though our glass melting takes place in a well-ventilated space (i.e. outside - concentrated sunlight, remember? ) we’d rather not expose ourselves to that. We are discontinuing making these two colors immediately, and will not be shipping them to any stores carrying our jewelry. The remainder of these colors will be sold through our webstore with the appropriate legal warning.

So, our jewelry (except those two discontinued colors) is in compliance with Prop 65, and I’ll be trying out some new lead-free glass colors as soon as the weather improves.

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With the rush on our webstore from the recent New York Times article, I figured it was a good time to update our report on the impact of shipping Sundrops.

Retail Boxes
We recently bought new boxes for mailing our webstore orders. Two years ago our 200# white corrugated boxes had no recycled content - now they’re 45% recycled! Also, we decided that we didn’t need the boxes to be quite as large, so we went with 4″x4″x2″ instead of 6″x4″x2″, shaving slightly more than half an ounce from their shipping weight. The Environmental Defense Fund paper calculator was helpful once again: net energy used in the production of these boxes dropped by 37%, and CO2 emissions by 42% compared to our previous boxes!

Wholesale Boxes
As I’ve mentioned before, the majority of our shipping is to retail stores, and for that we use the United States Postal Service’s free priority mail boxes. The boxes have received Cradle to Cradle Silver certification, but I have still been unable to find any hard numbers on their recycled content. The best I can do is this: the EPA guidelines for post-consumer recycled content in corrugated cardboard is 25-50%. The Postal Service stated that they had already exceeded EPA recycled content standards, and went even farther in order to receive Cradle-to-Cradle certification. That at least gives us a minimum.

However, the USPS has produced a sustainability report for 2008, providing both the total weight shipped via USPS in 2008 and the total emissions for all of their operations. Based on this, I calculated the impact of shipping a thousand pairs of earrings to both retail and wholesale customers.

Retail vs. Wholesale Shipping

Note: This chart doesn’t include the impact of
the boxes, just the Postal Service’s footprint
for mailing items. One could argue that the
free priority mail boxes are factored in here,
as they are counted in the overall USPS foot-
print, but it is certainly not representative of
our use of them. Unsurprisingly, the most pertinent factor in shipping retail versus wholesale is the number of earrings shipped together. Our direct retail orders are mostly for a single piece of jewelry (I’ve estimated an average of 1.25 pieces per shipment), and thus it takes about 800 shipments to send out our thousand pairs of earrings. Wholesale shipments are going to retail stores for reselling, and typically contain about 25 pieces of jewelry, meaning it only takes 40 shipments to send out those same thousand pairs of earrings! While the shipping impact of a wholesale order is almost exactly twice as big as the impact of shipping a retail order (bigger box, more weight), mailing 1000 earrings piecemeal to individuals has a 10 times greater impact.

Shopping: Online or Physical Store?
At this point, you may cover your eyes and say, “I’m never going to order things online again!” However, there has been a lot of talk about whether the impact of driving yourself to the retail store is better or worse than the extra shipping impact associated with online purchasing. Turns out it’s not at all clear cut which is better for the environment - it depends entirely on the exact circumstances.

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…Well, some recycled silver is available.
Rio Grande’s
“recycled” icon

Our primary supplier of jewelry findings, Rio Grande, now sells
recycled silver wire in all three gauges we use.

After much estimating, calculation, and conversion (thank you to my high school chemistry teacher for stoichiometry!), I determined that of the 15% (by weight) of a pair of carded earrings that is silver, 0.24 grams is silver wire. The other 0.3 grams is the ear hooks, which unfortunately are not yet available recycled.

Erin’s original post on the impact of unrecycled silver found that for 1000 pairs of earrings, silver uses three times as much energy (BTU’s) and emits five times as much CO2 as glass. And that’s without getting into mining’s environmental impacts aside from energy.

I wasn’t able to find any hard numbers on the energy and emissions associated with recycling silver, and the information I did find was mostly discussing silver-oxide batteries and photographic chemicals, which I would bet require more work to recycle than our sterling silver wire scraps. However, there is actual data available for recycling aluminum, most of which (food cans) is basically just melted down and re-formed into new cans. The process of recycling aluminum scrap emits only 5% of the CO2 and uses 5% of the energy necessary to extract and refine virgin material. For now, I will assume recycling silver scrap is similar.

While using recycled silver wire almost cuts our energy use and emissions for silver in half, it would make an even bigger difference if we could use recycled ear hooks. Using both - well that would just be ridiculous.

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Back to analyzing the environmental impact of Sundrop Jewelry…

Our old jewelry cards
Erin’s orignal post about paper calculated our impact using the Environmental Defense’s Paper Calculator. Our original cards were nothing special in terms of environmental friendliness, so we used the default national averages for paper (pulp composition, bleaching process, etc.). Doing the same calculation today gave me slightly lower numbers than Erin reported - the national average is improving!

Our new, improved, better-than-ever jewelry cards
When the time came to order new cards, we did some serious research and ordered something well-nigh perfect: a card half the size of the old card, printed by a local printer using soy-based ink on 100% post-consumer recycled content cardstock, which was whitened without chlorine. As you can see below, our impact is only a quarter to a third of what it was before in every category - except wood. No trees were harmed in the making of our jewelry cards.

Environmental impact of our old cards vs. our current jewelry cards
for 1000 pairs of earrings.

Printing
This graph does not include the impact of printing, only the paper it is printed on. According to the Energy Information Administration, the printing industry uses about 4% as much energy as the paper industry on a national level. In addition to energy use, there are VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds) and other toxins in standard petroleum-based ink.

We had our printing done by a local printer in Northfield, MN: Engage Print. They used soy-based inks, which produce a lot fewer VOCs, make it easier to recycle the paper they are printed on, and are renewable (mostly - there are things other than soybean oil in the ink). However, I presume that the amount of energy required to print the ink on paper remains mostly unchanged whether petroleum or soy ink is used. Although we cut our card in half, we now print both front and back, resulting in roughly the same amount of ink and printing process per card.

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Ever since Hig and Erin took off on their trek to Alaska (and even now they’re back) we’ve been remiss in addressing our company’s ecological footprint. So, here’s the dirt on shipping Sundrop Jewelry.

Wholesale
The vast majority of our business is wholesale to small retail stores, who generally order in (small) bulk: 30 pieces of jewelry is probably average. We use the free USPS Priotity Boxes for these orders. The nice thing is that in June they received Cradle to Cradle Silver Certification for their shipping supplies. Although they’ve boasted about their recycled content in a number of press releases it seems impossible to find out the actual amount that is recycled. Their main customer help line doesn’t know, the ‘Post Office Energy Hotline’ listed on their website turns out to be for internal Post Office use (and didn’t know the answer either), support@usps didn’t know and directed me to my local branch (which certainly didn’t know), someone directed me to their supplier (who gets everything from a different supplier and also didn’t know). Finally I emailed the press secretary who put out the press release in the first place. She didn’t know but passed on my email to someone who should, but I haven’t heard back for months. Is it just me, or should someone know the details since they managed to get Cradle to Cradle certification?

Retail
For the small shipments from our webstore we purchase 200# white corrugated boxes. I have not yet been able to determine the recycled content of these boxes, but hopefully will have that info for an upcoming post.

So far, our company is still small enough that we have no problem scrounging enough used bubble wrap, foam and blank newsprint to pad all of our shipments. This is all material that would probably otherwise go directly to the landfill.

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Native Silver    After 3 years in business, we finally recycled our silver scraps. Not that we used to throw them away, it just took us that long to accumulate enough scraps (tag ends of wire, bent ear hooks, botched wrappings, tarnished pieces, various failed experiments, etc.) to be worth sending in for recycling.

How much scrap did we produce in 3 years? 9.19 ounces. I could easily hold it all in my cupped hands.

We mailed our scraps to Rio Grande, our supplier of jewelry findings and where we got all our silver in the first place. Rio Grande offers 75% of market value in store credit or 65% of market value in cash. The price of silver was about $14.50 per ounce, and as regular customers we took our $99 in store credit.

  
Molten silver pouring
from a crucible Rio Grande will heat our scraps of sterling silver to 1640° F and pour the molten metal into molds.

   
Drawing wire through a hole
to reduce its diameter. Most of the silver we use is in the form of wire. To make wire, a narrow bar of silver is pulled through a tapered hole in a draw plate, lengthening the silver and reducing its width. The silver is pulled through successively smaller holes to make wires of various sizes. Some of that wire is subsequently shaped into other items, including the ear hooks and jump rings we purchase. We also use 18, 20 and 22 gauge wire.


New sterling silver wire and ear hooks - recycled content unknown.
Although Rio Grande accepts and recycles scrap silver, the recycled metal is not kept separate from virgin metal in the manufacturing process. As Erin blogged previously, we have still not been able to find any sources that publish or keep track of their recycled silver content. In general the precious metals and mining industries have a rather poor record of helping their customers consume responsibly. Consumers would do well do start demanding to know where their metal came from, and how it was extracted.

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Now for the fun part. Once we get all these materials to our studio (a.k.a. my house), what happens to them?


single-color sundrop The process is a bit different for single-color and multi-color sundrops. So I’ll start with the plain ones.

First step: Cut glass into strips. Very little waste in this step.
Second step: Melt glass into drops using the giant magnifying lens.


Me working at the lens I melt glass with a giant fresnel lens. 41×31 inches, it’s about 1270 square inches in area (0.82 square meters). Which means, at 1.4kW/square meter, about 1.1 kilowatts of energy are hitting the lens.

Melting glass with the Fresnel Lens
This is the fun part. First I tilt and aim the lens until the sunlight is focused on a rock attached to a wire stand. The lens rotates both horizontally and vertically, to adjust as the position and angle of the sun changes throughout the day. The rock moves up and down the wire stand for the same reason. With the rock as a backdrop, I can now see the bright spot where the sun is most intense (only with shade 8 welding goggles - it’s bright!)

Then I hold the end of the glass at the focal point (about the diameter of a fat pencil). The hot spot is pretty concentrated. As long as the piece of glass I’m holding is at least as long as a pencil, my hand is safe. And most of my body is actually in the shade of the lens.

The hot spot can get up to 3000 degrees Farenheit! But that depends on what I’m focusing on. Light has no inherent temperature - darker colored objects absorb more and will get hotter. Lighter colored things absorb less. Completely transparent glass - I can’t melt at all.


glass heating in the lens The end of the glass strip starts melting within seconds. I continue heating it until I’ve got a good molten glob, then flip the strip over so the glob is pointing down. Gravity and surface tension pull the molten glass into a lobe that cools as it falls and stretches into the Sundrop shape.


sundrop dripping

Timing is critical here - if I screw up, it falls all the way to the ground, becoming flat on the bottom. The final sundrop is connected to the strip by a thin stringer of glass, which I break off to disconnect it.


putting the ball on the end Later, I take the sharp-ended sundrop, and hold it in a pair of tongs, remelting the end. Surface tension forms it into a ball - which I’ll later use to hold the silver wire wrapping in place.

If you want to see this in action (and don’t live in Seattle’s University District), go to the Sundrop Jewelry web page and watch the movies!

Environmental Impact
Well, it’s all solar, so I’m not using up any fuel. The main impacts from this step are a small amount of glass waste (sometimes I screw up the Sundrops), and the impact from producing the lens. I’m not sure what kind of plastic is in the lens or how hard it is to make, but since the lens will last for several years before it’s too warped/scratched, I think it’s not too big of a deal.

Comparison to Lampwork
Lampwork (making glass beads in a torch) is the most similar type of glasswork to what we’re doing here. Since lampwork is often done on a small at-home scale, I couldn’t find really good numbers on energy use. But beads can often take up to an hour to produce (an individual lampworked bead is usually larger and more detailed than a Sundrop). There are two commonly used kinds of torch setups - single fuel (propylene or propane), and dual fuel (propane + oxygen). For single fuel, a 1lb propylene tank lasts for 3-4 hours - so only a handful of beads. Dual fuel will be more efficient. And since lampwork beads are larger and need to be annealed, there’s also energy used in a kiln heating step.


multi-color sundrop For single-color Sundrops, we have none of these fuel and energy costs - it’s all solar. For multi-color Sundrops, we do most of the heating in the lens - but there are some kiln and torch steps where we haven’t managed to go solar yet - more on the impact of those next week.

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This blog’s been empty for a bit. But now I’m back in town after a few weeks in Alaska testing out winter gear for an upcoming 4000 mile environmental expedition.

The last ingredient in a pair of Sundrop Earrings is rubber. We put little rubber ear nuts on the backs of the french ear wires. Partly to hold them on the card for display and shipping, and partly to prevent people from losing the earrings wearing them. Of course, people often don’t remember to use them, so we end up fairly often re-matching a mate to someone’s lost earring (something we’re generally happy to do).


Rubber tree
So, I have to figure out what these are made of, and where they come from. In the catalog, all it says is: “Rubber Hypoallergenic French Ear Wire Guards”. This could be either natural or synthetic rubber - it’s not specified. Wikipedia tells me that about 42% of rubber used is natural, and the rest is synthetic, so it could go either way.

Natural vs synthetic rubber. Natural rubber is a renewable resource, made from the sap of the Hevea brasiliensis tree. But rubber plantations can cause habitat loss when they displace existing tropical forests. Synthetic rubber is made from petroleum. Petroleum is obviously non-renewable, and synthetic rubber takes more energy to make (we’re using fossil fuels to synthesize polymers, while the trees use solar energy). I’m not sure how it shakes out in the end between these two, but synthetic rubber has been steadily replacing natural rubber.


Waste tires Unfortunately, trying to look up the impacts of rubber manufacturing on the web is leading me to a whole lot of dead ends, largely regarding tires. Apparently the disposal of used tires is a huge problem, and many many websites are eager to tell me about the various things that can be done with used tires, such as covering playgrounds, making asphalt, in flooring, rubber bands, etc…

What I’d actually like to know is more specifics about the rubber manufacturing in the first place. However, rubber ear nuts are only about 0.005 ounces/pair (a pair is about a tenth of an ounce total). In my calculations so far, I’ve been looking at 1000 pairs of earrings, almost 8 pounds worth. In all that, rubber ear nuts are still only about 5 ounces. Basically, I really doubt they’re a huge part of Sundrop Jewelry’s impact.

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About 15% of a pair of earrings is silver - in the form of ear hooks and wire. And this is the thing I’ve been most worried about in terms of environmental impact. Over the past couple years I’ve been very involved trying to fight a mining proposal in Alaska: Pebble Mine. This has led me to learn all sorts of frightening things about the mining industry’s track record and impact on the environment.

Mining Industry Record

• Mining is the most polluting industry in the country ( EPA Toxics Release Inventory).
• Major threats to water include acid mine drainage, cyanide spills, and heavy metal pollution.
• Fish are especially sensitive to heavy metals in the water (more than people).
• A recent study shows that 76% of the U.S. mines surveyed exceeded water quality standards, polluting rivers and groundwater.
• According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), mine waste has contaminated more than 40 percent of the headwaters of western watersheds.

Buying Better Silver?
This begs the obvious question - can we avoid contributing to these problems by buying recycled or otherwise responsibly mined silver?

As far as I can tell - no. This is one of the big problems in the metal industry - there are so many middlemen, and no way for consumers to tell where the metal comes from. Hence no pressure on the mining companies to be more responsible. The numbers above are from the U.S. In third world countries, the problems are even worse.

Ethical Metalsmiths and No Dirty Gold have made some progress on demanding greener gold, and trying to pressure jewelry retailers to carry it. Gold is a bigger problem than silver, simply because gold is rarer and more precious. It is present at much lower concentrations in the ore, so more damage is done getting a given amount of gold out of the ground. But silver is subject to all the same problems - metal ores often occur together, so they actually come from many of the same mines.


Printing vs Paper and Glass Energy Use and Greenhouse Gases
This is a pretty rough calculation, involving a whole lot of metric/english unit conversions (courtesy of google). Searching for the ounces per ton of silver at different mines, and looking in the book “Golden Dreams, Poisoned Streams”, I found that 25 oz/ton seemed about right (number is on the high end to try and take into account that the ton of ore contains other metals as well). Then I headed over to Canada to get the
“energy intensity” of their mining industry, expressed in Gigajoules per metric tonne of ore. I’ll just assume Canada is representative. Then I multiplied that by how many ounces of silver you get in a ton of ore, and how many ounces are in a thousand pairs of sundrop earrings. I don’t have CO2 numbers directly, but am assuming the carbon emissions per energy unit are similar to glass and paper.

The answer is pretty rough, but shows that silver is several times more wasteful than paper or glass in straight energy terms. This is despite the fact that we use more glass and paper than we do silver. And it’s not even accounting for most of mining’s impacts described above - just the energy. I don’t have a great solution to. But it seems like what all users of silver need to do is start putting pressure on our suppliers - perhaps we can get a source of recycled silver.

A few more notes on Silver
In addition to silver being an environmental problem, it’s also been rapidly increasing in price over the past few years, along with most other precious metals. See Infomine, and the USGS summary and mineral yearbook. Demand for silver has been fairly flat - decreases in photography making up for the increases in other uses. One of the reasons is that there are now “Exchange Traded Funds” for silver and gold that make it easier for investors to buy and sell metals as a stock. This is important because it increases mining activity beyond the demand for using metals to actually produce things - increasing the environmental impact along with it.

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