The cost of gold

Ever wonder what it takes to make a gold ring? Last night I discovered that the process of extracting 10 grams of gold from the earth produces on average 3 tons of toxic waste, including chemicals like mercury and cyanide. To give you an idea, my wedding band weighs 8 grams...so that's 4,800 pounds of toxic waste to make my ring.
I was at a gathering of entrepreneurs at a small pub on the Thames. One of the presenters at the evening was Greg Valerio from Cred Jewellery. They have managed to produce one of the world's only ethical lines of gold and platinum jewellery. They are able to trace the gold they sell directly back to the mine that produced it, and can demonstrate that all parties involved - miners, the environment, and the craftsmen - have been treated in a just and equitable way. They are working to implement practices that would allow them to sell fairly traded diamonds as well (currently they sell conflict-free diamonds, mostly from Canada, but these are still not fairly traded).
Just to give one example of the inequity in the diamond trade, Greg told of a diamond miner in Africa who mined an 8-carat red diamond. He was paid $2000 for the diamond. When that diamond was sold in New York later that year, it fetched a price of $200,000,000. Now, $2000 may be more than enough to live on for an entire year in his country, but is it really equitable that the miner only received .001% of the final sales value of his product?
So what am I, a church-planter, doing at an entrepreneurial gather, and why am I going on and on about fine jewelery? Well, I was at the gathering for the sake of meeting people who are starting new initiatives, hoping to get ideas, make connections...all in an effort to clarify the vision for new churches here. And as for ethical jewelery, I care about it because God cares. God hates it when people destroy his planet. He hates it when the poor are exploited and patronized by the rich. And he hates it when global economic structures that maintain poverty go unchallenged. We shouldn't merely sit back and wish children weren't forced to work in mines, we should do something about it. Cred is doing something about it.