Yet another jeweler has pledged not to use gold from Pebble.
Trying to keep that pledge is problematic according to a professor at the Colorado School of Mines and the Director of the No Dirty Gold campaign.
Tracing the origin of gold is no easy task, said Pat Taylor, a professor of chemical metallurgy and metallurgical engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Typically, when a mine recovers gold it is sent to a refinery. The refined gold is sold as bars, coin or other products.
"To keep track of gold is hard to do," Taylor said. "Typically when a gold mine recovers gold they send it to a refinery and it's largely mixed in one big pot. So how you would identify gold from one mine from any other mine is going to be very difficult."
Scott Cardiff, the No Dirty Gold campaign director, admits that there currently are no mechanisms for jewelers to trace the source of their gold other than to establish an agreement with their suppliers to not use metals from a particular source.
LINK (Via: R&D)