With festivals encouraging gold consumption and a society that holds gold investments in high regard, India has always seen gold as a positive. So when the World Gold Council’s data disclosed gold consumption in India had increased to 797.3 tonnes in 2021, it wasn’t completely surprising. But while we consider gold auspicious culturally, it comes with a host of environmental concerns like mercury and cyanide pollution, high carbon emissions and habitat destruction.
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But as fashion heads towards the path of sustainability with each passing day, sustainable jewellery options grow at an equal pace. We got the founder of Aulerth, Vivek Ramabhadran, to share what it takes to create a sustainable traditional jewellery brand. Aulerth houses traditional designs made out of sustainable materials like recycled industrial waste and high-quality stones. With three Indian designers in tow- Suneet Varma, Tribe by Amrapali and JJ Valaya- a customer gets three distinct design aesthetics under one roof, all the while being sustainable. According to Ramabhadran, design was of utmost importance, with sustainability being a basic necessity of the designs. “We follow a sustainable ethos because that’s what we believe in. We do not expect that our clients will all make a purchase just because it’s sustainable. So we have to challenge ourselves to create something that’s so exquisite in design, meticulously crafted and so special to covet and own that the consumer should just buy it out of desire to own this product. And then the fact that it happens to be sustainable and therefore the carbon footprint is lower- that’s on us,” he says.