In an environmentally-friendly approach, MATY pioneered the use of synthetic diamonds to complement natural diamonds.
Pursuing this commitment, MATY favors recycled gold: today, 75% of its collection is made from recycled gold, with the ambitious goal of reaching 100% by the end of 2025. Just as precious as mined gold, recycled gold is the ideal ecological alternative for enhancing your finest jewels. Discover its many advantages here.
WHAT IS RECYCLED GOLD?
Gold jewelry is always precious jewelry. That's why it's rare for them to be thrown away when they no longer appeal. In general, their owners prefer to give them away or sell them. At this point, jewelry can be given two alternatives: it can be resold second-hand, or it can be dismantled and the gold recovered for smelting. Recycled gold is therefore melted metal that originally came from old gold objects, often other jewels.
There is, however, a second way of recovering gold: the trimmings or waste produced during the manufacture of gold jewelry, whether the gold is mined or already recycled. Jewellers often have recycled gold in their workshops, since they recover this precious waste during the manufacture of their jewelry. Recycled gold is as pure as freshly mined gold, as the recycling process includes all modern purification processes. Once melted, the metal is then reshaped to enable new gold jewelry to be made, using the same methods as if the gold had been recently mined.
WHY CHOOSE RECYCLED GOLD JEWELRY?
Using recycled gold is an eco-responsible, social and economic gesture. Recycled gold does not come from an extraction mine, so it saves not only natural resources, but also the energy needed to extract them, such as fuel for vehicles or drilling equipment, and electricity for installations. What's more, if the recycled gold comes directly from the jeweller's workshops, the process avoids any form of pollution due to transport between the mine and the workshop. Last but not least, the use of recycled gold also reduces the need for extraction work, which is hard on the workers and often poorly remunerated in their country of origin.
Opting for recycled gold jewelry is therefore an environmentally-friendly approach that recovers waste produced by other activities (melting down old gold objects or making jewelry), and therefore limits the mass of unused residues. What's more, using recycled gold is a good investment for your budget, as its cost price is lower, thanks in particular to savings on transport and labor.
To recycle gold from old jewelry, or from the manufacture of other jewelry in a workshop, the first step is to collect the raw material. There are professional channels for collecting old jewelry, and the workshops themselves recover the scrap gold they produce. This raw material is then sent to a foundry, where the gold is sorted according to its quality. To obtain the purest gold, the metal is melted at 1,100 degrees, which separates it from any other metals present in the form of alloys. This is also the stage at which the gold is stripped of all impurities. At the end of this process, the resulting metal is cast into ingots of 99.9% pure gold, i.e. 24-carat gold. The foundry then sells the ingots to jewelry companies.
Thanks to the various stages of preparation just mentioned, recycled gold has exactly the same properties as freshly mined gold, in terms of both appearance and physical qualities. Recycled gold is a perfectly pure metal, indistinguishable from that which comes from an extraction site: jewelry made from recycled gold therefore has the same strength as its counterpart made from mined gold.
Recycled gold jewelry also has the same color and texture as the others, so you can make the same pieces: the same functions, the same shapes, the same settings. When you buy recycled gold jewelry, you're opting for solidity and the highest quality... at much lower prices!