How Tiffany & Co. Helped Make Mining More Sustainable

“Let me tell you something. You sell blood diamonds, too.”

Leonardo DiCaprio’s Danny Archer spoke those words to Jennifer Connelly’s Maddy Bowen in the 2006 film Blood Diamond, which sparked a global conversation about how, where, and why diamonds are procured for products ranging from engagement rings to lasers. The quote was an acerbic rejoinder to Bowen’s brash confidence that she bore no culpability for Africa’s rough-and-tumble diamond trade.

Indeed, as DiCaprio’s character underscored, she did, because she and billions of others bought products every day mined out of the earth.

Michael J. Kowalski had already begun to consider those issues when he took the reins of Tiffany & Co. in 1999. The iconic retailer is known the world over for its rings, necklaces, watches, and myriad other jewelry products made from gold, silver, platinum, and other metals wrapped in proprietary blue-hued bags and boxes. The company maintains its high quality standards because it makes most of its own jewelry. What Tiffany does not control, though, is the mining of metals for its products. For Kowalski, that was a problem.

“We began to realize that the jewelry industry broadly and Tiffany specifically didn’t have a strong understanding of the metals supply chain and the sourcing of the building blocks for the products we sold,” Kowalski said. It was a reputational risk to the company’s bottom line. After all, buying an engagement or wedding ring is one of the most intimate purchases a person can ever make. Buying a ring made with gold that came from a mine where workers made only pennies per day or toiled in atrocious conditions was sure to zap any brand loyalty many of Tiffany’s customers had. “Jewelry is an emotionally laden product, and you want to feel absolutely secure in its origin story,” he said. “We understood that we could use the power of the Tiffany brand to raise awareness.” But Kowalski was an economist by training, not a mining engineer. He had no clue how to run a mine.

Mines are giant behemoths carved into the earth’s crust that belch dust and toxins. But they also birth treasures, the building blocks for products used by Tiffany and every other manufacturer on the planet. Much of what every human touches every single day comes from the ground—typically through a mine or a farm. Kowalski realized this, as well as the inherent risk for Tiffany. It was not enough for Tiffany to stop buying metals from unsavory places; Kowalski came to understand that Tiffany had to use its clout and purchasing power to force all mines to honor workers and the environment.

Kowalski started in what he considered obvious areas. In 2002, Tiffany banned the sale of jewelry made from coral, a stance that over time was embraced by more of its jewelry peers. Coral is, after all, a kind of underwater forest helping to filter the world’s oceans and provide shelter for a plethora of fish and other creatures. To actively encourage the mining of coral sent a signal that Tiffany did not care about the ocean and thus the world itself. For Kowalski, that wouldn’t do.

That same year, in the absence of global mining standards, Tiffany signed a deal to buy most of its silver and gold from Rio Tinto’s Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah, near Salt Lake City. The mine, operating since 1906, had grown to become the deepest open pit in the world, at depths of nearly 4,000 feet. “It was a legacy mine, and no one was putting a big hole in the middle of the Amazon,” Kowalski said. “It was responsibly managed and had a smelter on-site.” Some environmental groups were irked that Tiffany did business with the mine, especially one located right outside a major U.S. metropolis. But where should the company get its metals and at what standards? Tiffany was feeling its way through the metaphorical dark. “We were willing to do the right thing, but there were not standards telling us where to get the gold,” Kowalski said.

Then, in February 2004, the environmental group Earthworks and the global relief organization Oxfam America launched an international campaign targeting the jewelry industry. Titled “No Dirty Gold,” the campaign planned to target Tiffany and its jeweler peers in an attempt to sway where they purchased the yellow metal. On Valentine’s Day that year, the groups handed out cards to shoppers at jewelry stores across three major American cities bearing the imperative: Don’t tarnish your love with dirty gold.

Kowalski, who had already been thinking about gold sourcing, took notice. He called Steve D’Esposito, the president of Earthworks, asking how he and Tiffany could help. The environmentalists were shocked. Not only was one of the jewelry companies they had expected to target now asking to join forces with them, but it was also one of the world’s most iconic jewelry companies.

Soon the new partners both had their first target. Late that March, Tiffany paid for a full-page ad in The Washington Post that was essentially a blown-up letter written from Kowalski to Dale Bosworth, then head of the U.S. Forest Service. Topped by the Tiffany & Co. logo, the letter implored Bosworth not to approve the proposed Rock Creek Mine in eastern Montana, despite the immense amounts of copper and silver that it would produce.

It was a major broadside from one of the mining industry’s biggest customers. Mining companies were incensed. “I was stunned that a person of Mr. Kowalski’s stature and obvious business acumen would write a letter like that,” said Laura Skaer, who at the time ran the Northwest Mining Association, a trade group for mining companies in the U.S. Northwest. But it worked. As of early 2024, the Rock Creek mine has yet to win regulatory approval.

In 2008, Kowalski went a step further and publicly opposed plans by a Canadian company to build the Pebble Mine in Alaska. The project would unearth one of the world’s largest copper and gold deposits, supplying Tiffany and other jewelers the metals they needed for decades to come. But it had been wildly controversial since the deposit was discovered in 1987, with opponents alarmed it would ravage pristine Alaskan wilderness that is home to the state’s extensive salmon fishing industry. The proposed mine site also sits near an active fault line, fueling fears random earthquakes could topple tailings dams and cause cave-ins. “There are certain places where mines should just never be built, and Bristol Bay in Alaska is just one of those places,” Kowalski said.

By 2011, Tiffany had convinced fifty of its fellow jewelers to oppose the Pebble project. Three years later, President Barack Obama’s administration said it was considering canceling the Pebble project. By 2023, U.S. regulators had effectively killed the proposed mine.

Coral was a relatively easy thing to ban given the importance of coral reefs to the ecological health of the world’s oceans. And opposing the Rock Creek and Pebble projects made logical sense just given the risk of ecological harm. But Tiffany couldn’t simply fight all gold, silver, and platinum mines. It had to find a way to buy from the best mines, and it had to insist that standards be set for responsible mining.

“We wanted to do the right thing. But we were a retailer and a manufacturer, not a miner. What is a commonly accepted definition of responsible mining? There wasn’t a clear answer anywhere,” Kowalski said. So, around the same time as the jeweler was opposing the Rock Creek and Pebble mines, it embarked on the second prong of its mission. In 2006, Earthworks and Tiffany expanded their relationship by starting a long journey into setting the best mining standards.

Taking inspiration from the Forest Stewardship Council, which sets standards for timber harvesting and forest management, Tiffany and Earthworks helped to form the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, commonly known as IRMA. IRMA aimed to succeed where others failed by bringing together mining companies; their customers, including jewelers, automakers, and tech firms; environmental groups and other nongovernmental organizations; local communities, including Indigenous groups; and labor unions. The intent was to set the best standards for how a mine should operate.

If the world needed more mines—and it did and does for the foreseeable future—then the only option was to decide how best to mine. That, at least, was the intention behind IRMA. “When you walk into a room with people who—especially in this day and age right now—see the world differently and yet who are kind to one another . . . that’s radical work,” said Aimee Boulanger, a former Earthworks mining activist who became IRMA’s executive director. Slowly, the members started to work together.

In 2014, IRMA published a rough draft of its standards for the world to tear apart. “It wasn’t perfect, but it was a compromise and the first time all these groups had put standards in place,” Boulanger said. The group received more than a thousand public comments about the draft standards. The Stillwater platinum mine in Montana agreed to undergo a mock audit in 2015, essentially agreeing to be IRMA’s guinea pig.

By 2016, a second version of the draft standards was published—a decade after Kowalski had phoned Earthworks.

Tiffany and its jewelry peers were thrilled at the progression. “We believe IRMA will address a current gap in the mining industry by providing an independent certification system that consumers can trust and that sets a high bar for social and environmental performance,” Tiffany told its shareholders in 2016. IRMA hadn’t been formed to necessarily approve or disapprove mines; rather, it had been formed to bring transparency to an industry that had historically been myopic at best and duplicitous at worst. And the standards were launching just as the green energy transition was taking off.

Today, companies and consumers can publicly access IRMA’s reviews of mining companies; it’s immediately obvious if a mining company is cheating or trying to bend the rules. IRMA standards are now a potent tool for those opposed to mines across the globe, while also giving automakers and other manufacturers a sense of relief that they are buying ethically sourced lithium, copper, and other metals for the green energy transition. As Boulanger said: “Mining is really difficult, and yes, it causes harm. But we do have the technology to do things better; we just need the whole value chain to support us.”

Excerpted from THE WAR BELOW published by One Signal/Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 2024 by Ernest Scheyder.

Scheyder is a senior correspondent for Reuters covering the green energy transition and the minerals that undergird it.