Fair rings

Mining is a dirty business. No question about it. You need to move about 20 tonnes of earth to create enough gold for a wedding ring. Often cyanide is involved in the mining. And the people on whose land the mining takes places do not benefit. All too often, they have their soils poisoned, instead (auf Deutsch gibts hier einen interessanten Bericht von unserem Freund Marc Engelhardt aus Ghana). So, shopping for wedding rings troubled us. We want one (well, two), of course. We want beautiful ones, too. But we do not want to, quite literally, have blood on our hands. - We want to look at our hand to be reminded of the fun wedding (and of being committed to caring for each other even when we can't get up the stairs anymore ...). But we do not want to look at our hands and think of destruction. - Easy, we thought. We will just google "fair gold" or "fair wedding rings". We did ... - and were shocked at how little we could find. For all the talk of there being a consumer trend towards ethical consumerism - dirty gold few seem to want to address. We did find one neat place for silver rings, silverchilli, but were advised strongly against silver by some friends. Finally, we located the Atelier Dosch - as far as we could make out, the only place in Germany, that works with fair trade gold (and supports FIAN). So, while we haven't sorted many details for August, our wedding rings are ready. Beautiful. And fair. Thank you, Petra Hoch-Dosch.