Jos talks recycling: Old gold = new jewels

I was walking to work on Saturday and saw this ‘gold’ bike chained to a tree. The owner has written down the side “Don’t steal this bike it’s shit and only cost £20 – true”. It made me chuckle I then spotted they had also written “not real gold” on part of the frame, and I couldn’t resist a photo.

As the EC One stores are only a few miles apart I pretty much always shun the tube and take my bike. This has its advantages as you can always beat the traffic, however turning up a bit overheated (sweaty) when you have an appointment with a customer isn’t always ideal…

But, on the theme of gold, we have lots of jobs on in the EC One workshop at the moment where our customers want to remodel or use gold from existing jewellery to create something gorgeous and up-to-date. On an environmental level this is about as green as you can be as you aren’t damaging the environment but recycling this precious metal. The amazing thing about gold is you can just melt it down and start again, I often wonder how old the gold we are using might be. It could have been mined last year in South Africa or be from the Spanish conquistadors stolen from the Aztecs. No one really knows…

With the global downturn people are buying gold as an investment which has pushed the price of gold to record highs. So using that broken chain, single earring or ‘bad relationship jewellery’ is actually a very clever way of having some new and unique jewellery created for you. If you have enough scrap gold lying around we could even make you a bike, but I wouldn’t recommend leaving it on the street…

Jos