Bowerbird Jewels is committed to creating jewellery that is not only good for you but has the lowest impact on the environment we can manage. We understand that the easiest way to limit our impact is to make no new things at all – but we want to be able to offer beautiful jewellery pieces to our Birds that are affordable and approachable and be able to do that in an ethical way.
That’s why we choose to craft our collections from pure metals, particularly both sterling silver and gold, as both these items can be recycled. We work only with companies that we know and trust, allowing us to ensure that their staff are paid fairly at every level of the manufacturing chain, and we are just as committed to our direct team in Australia, ensuring that they are paid a fair wage for the work they have done. We source our diamonds from conflict-free sources that comply with the Kimberley process and our gemstones are sourced from ethical dealers, or directly from mines, allowing us to support those organisations doing the right thing by their team and the environment.
Bowerbird Jewels aims to use recycled metals where and when we can, in both our jewellery and our packaging, although we do acknowledge that this is not always 100% achievable. We are continually looking at ways to improve our impact on the planet, and we focus on limiting the impact of every part of our process, from recycling as many items as we can through our warehouse or workshop (both paper and plastic), to encouraging our customers to return their packaging so that it can be reused. We wrap all our items in recycled paper and recycled cartons for shipping.
As part of our ongoing commitment to sustainable and ethical jewellery, Bowerbird Jewels have developed our Return – Recycle – Reuse program. We want to encourage all our birds to bring any jewellery items that are unwanted or broken to us so we can do the ethical thing and collectively recycle them on your behalf. While it might seem like a small gesture individually, as a collective we can have a much larger impact. We then take that recycled metal and ensure that it goes back into the closed-loop lifecycle, returning to the world as more beautiful jewellery.
100% of the proceeds from the outturn of our Return – Recycle – Reuse program is donated to the Resea Project, which are dedicating its time and resources to saving and protecting the ocean from plastic waste. In 2019 they removed 426 tonnes of plastic from the ocean, which is a truly herculean effort. We hope that by contributing to a project like Resea, which is dedicated and focused on being completely transparent in its recycling of plastics, we can offset some of the impacts of producing new items, minimising our overall footprint.
If you have any silver or gold jewellery that is worth less to you, but you would like to donate please drop it into us at our various market locations or you can post to:
Bowerbird - Return, Recycle and Reuse Program
PO Box 189 Sylvania Southgate
NSW 2221
We are proud of our current commitments and we are proud to be tackling the problems of sustainable and ethical jewellery on a number of fronts, from procurement to purchase and recycling and end of life for products. It is important that our Birds understand the power that they have to put their values where their wallet is – choose to buy from companies that are dedicated to doing things better and working in ways that you can be proud to support.