Recycled gold vs mined gold: the environmental case, honestly

What the supply numbers actually are

World Gold Council data for the full year 2025 puts total gold supply at 5,002.3 tonnes, the highest in its annual series going back to 1970. Of that, mine production was 3,671.6 tonnes and recycling was 1,404.3 tonnes, so recycled metal was a little over 28 per cent of all gold supplied that year.

Source: World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends full year 2025. Shares are rounded and include a small negative contribution from producer hedging, which is why the two shares do not sum to exactly 100.

Where mined gold’s footprint comes from

Gold is unusually emissions-intensive per unit of finished metal, for a straightforward physical reason: there is very little of it in the rock. Open-pit gold operations commonly work ore grading between roughly 0.5 and 1.5 grams per tonne, so producing a single gram of gold can mean moving, crushing and processing the better part of a tonne of rock. Underground mines work higher grades, typically in the 5 to 8 grams per tonne range, but at higher energy cost per tonne handled.

S&P Global Market Intelligence found that 329 primary gold mines emitted greenhouse gases at an average rate of 792 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per paid ounce of gold in 2023, down from around 831 kg in 2021. Scope 2 emissions, from purchased electricity and heat, made up 39 per cent of that total. Across those mines the total was 46.63 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2023.

Emissions are not the only measure. Research published in Environmental Research Letters in 2022 by a team including Oxford’s Smith School put the water requirement at an average of 265,000 litres per kilogram of gold produced, estimated the global gold industry at around 0.3 per cent of global emissions, and attributed 38 per cent of global anthropogenic mercury emissions to small-scale gold mining, largely in the global south. Mercury is used in artisanal processing to amalgamate gold from ore and is then burned off, which is precisely why it ends up in the atmosphere and in watercourses.

Where recycled gold’s footprint comes from

Recycling skips extraction entirely. What remains is collection and transport, sorting and assay, melting, and the refining chemistry itself, which is energy-intensive but operates on material that is already between roughly 37 and 92 per cent gold rather than a fraction of a gram per tonne. That is the whole of the environmental argument, and on its own terms it is sound.

A clean like-for-like number is harder to come by than the marketing suggests. Refiners publish product carbon footprints rather than separate recycled and mined figures. MKS PAMP, for example, published a cradle-to-gate figure of 9,729.93 kgCO2e per kilogram of gold for its general feed gold grains in 2025, but that product was assessed on a blended input of roughly 36 per cent recycled and 64 per cent virgin material, using the EU Circular Footprint Formula. It is a real published figure and it is not a recycled-only figure. Anyone quoting a precise per-gram carbon saving for recycled gold should be asked which study it came from and what its allocation method was.

The argument against the green claim, stated properly

The strongest criticism of recycled gold marketing is not that the metal is dirty. It is that buying it does not reduce mining. Gold is not consumed the way most commodities are. It is hoarded, vaulted, held by central banks and traded as a financial asset, and mine output responds to price and to the economics of individual deposits rather than to how much scrap jewellery reaches refiners in a given year.

The critique, made by IMPACT and others working on responsible sourcing, adds two further points. Artisanal and small-scale mining, which accounts for the mercury problem, is largely poverty-driven: those miners keep mining whether or not jewellers switch to recycled feedstock. And the trade definition of recycled is loose enough to include recently minted bullion bars sent back for re-refining, which have no meaningful recycling benefit at all and can, in the worst cases, launder poorly sourced metal into a clean-sounding category.

None of that makes recycling bad. It makes the specific claim that choosing recycled gold prevents a corresponding amount of mining unsupported by the evidence.

What can be said accurately

• Metal already above ground has paid its extraction cost. Recovering it and putting it back into use is a genuinely lower-impact way of meeting a given unit of demand than digging new ore for that unit.
• The physical case is strongest at the margin that matters to households: gold sitting unworn in a drawer is doing nothing at all, and recovering it displaces nothing but idleness.
• A per-gram carbon saving figure is difficult to substantiate and depends heavily on the allocation method used. Treat precise claims with suspicion.
• Recycling does not fix the mercury problem in artisanal mining. That requires intervention in those supply chains, not a change of feedstock in Western jewellery manufacture.
• Researchers at Oxford have argued that recycled supply alone could meet all technological demand for gold and more than a third of jewellery demand, which is a serious argument, but it is a scenario about the whole system, not about one household’s parcel.

Where this leaves a UK household with a drawer of old jewellery

In a reasonable place, provided nobody oversells it. Selling unworn gold returns real metal to a supply chain that would otherwise need it from somewhere, and the alternative, leaving it in a drawer for another twenty years, has no environmental benefit whatsoever. That is a modest, defensible claim and it is the one we make.

What we will not tell you is that your broken chain offsets a quantity of mining, or that selling it carries a calculable carbon benefit. We do not have the data to support either and neither does anybody else selling you the idea. The route the metal actually takes is described in what happens to your gold after you sell it.

Limitations of the figures above

Every number here comes from a named published source and is stated with its year, because figures in this area drift and are often quoted without one. Mine emissions intensity varies enormously by deposit, grade, power source and mining method, so a global average conceals a very wide range. Water figures depend on whether recycled process water is counted. Supply figures are revised. And comparisons between mined and recycled carbon footprints are highly sensitive to the allocation methodology chosen, which is why credible sources tend to publish blended product figures rather than clean side-by-side numbers.

Common questions

Related guides

Reference pages

• Gold price today, UK rates
• Silver price today, UK rates
• UK gold hallmark guide
• How we value gold