Our+Research

You can add content related to our research here. In conducting this work, we will answer the following questions:


 * From where does our stuff come?
 * To what people and places does our stuff connect us?
 * What environmental ethics are possible there?
 * Are these people and places within our environmental ethics?

Keys points about aluminum:
 * Aluminum cans**
 * Aluminum comes from bauxite.
 * Australia, China Brazil, Guinea and Jamaica our the worlds top 5 largest bauxite producers.
 * Refining aluminum from bauxite takes enormous amounts of energy.
 * Mining bauxite takes more destroys more surface area than mining any other ore.
 * Aluminum production accounts for about 2% of global power consumption.
 * To refine one can's worth of aluminum it takes energy equivalent to 1/4 of a can of gasoline and releases 200 cans worth of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
 * Recycling aluminum takes 5% of the energy of producing new aluminum.
 * Recycling companies make the majority of their profits from reselling recycled aluminum.
 * Cans are most recyclable drink container in the world.
 * More than 1/2 the cans in the world are recycled.
 * An average of 113,204 cans are recycled per day.
 * The average employee drinks 2.5 drinks in aluminum cans per day.

For our research we have decided to focus on gold in the Driefontein mine. In the book "Confessions of an Eco-sinner" Fred Pearce goes to a gold mine in Driefontein, South Africa to find out where his wedding band came from. In researching this particular mine I found an article that interviews several workers about their experience in a resent worker strike. Here is the article. __[]__. Some of the writing on the HTML version is messy but if you google the mine you should be able to get to the picture format of the article which is readable if you use the zoom in tool.
 * Jewelry/precious metals**

**Driefontien Mine info:**  **Location: 70km(~43.49mi) west of Johannesburg, South Africa.(Gauteng Province).** > No.2 processes both underground ore, and surface material. No.3 processes only surface material. []
 * There are 3 gold plants: No1. processes mostly underground ore.
 * The lowest level still working is level 50. it 3,300 meters below the suface.
 * Driefontien employs 15,501 permanent workers and 2,244 contractors.

This is a article about the effect of miners on the spread of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. []

Rice's Jewelry: Suppliers: -Hoover & Strong, Staller, etc. Hoover & Strong: FAQS: For more information go to: [|http://www.hooverandstrong.com/category/HARMONY+at+Hoover+and+Strong/]
 * Policy only to buy Eco-friendly precious metals
 * All Precious metals come from metals that are already in circulation.
 * All products are made in America
 * Do not buy precious metal from mining companies.
 * Half of total precious metal supply comes from scrap metal purchased from Jewelers.
 * Remainder of supply comes from other refineries that also recycle scrap metal
 * They can refine scrap metals themselves.
 * They buy some of their scrap metal from everyday people.
 * All their item are made from refined/recycled scrap metal.
 * They use a newly developed gold refining process that reduces quantity of waste products generated per ounce recovered by 75%
 * All furnace chemical exhaust fumes goes through a scrubber system to remove all toxins to the environment
 * no water waste is discharged into the environment
 * All cooling water for refining smelting furnaces is fully recycled

“Jeans are the Coca Cola of clothing – consumed almost everywhere in the world. But they’re in trouble – with the environment, with the people who make them, and even with the people who are supposed to wear them”
 * Denim jeans**
 * · On average, 12% of the money you spend on a pair of jeans goes to the people who made it. Over half goes to the retailers, the people who sell it.
 * · Denim jeans are made from cotton, the world’s most popular fibre. Cotton crops cover 34 million hectares of the surface of the earth and use 25% of all the world’s pesticides. Each year, there is an estimated one million cases of pesticide poisoning and 20,000 deaths per year are attributed to cotton
 * · The Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) of Asia began by exporting textiles and clothing. First in Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan, then in Indonesia and Thailand – Singapore and Malaysia are exceptions – big increases in the export of textiles and clothing marked the beginning of ‘export-oriented’ industrial growth:
 * · Nearly all jeans are stitched together in hundreds of thousands of low-wage ‘sweatshops’ and private homes around the world
 * · The Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia (TCFUA) estimates that the Australian garment industry now employs 15 people as ‘outworkers’, usually at home – working an average 14-18 hours a day for less than $2 an hour – for every one factory worker, whose average wage is $9 an hour. Most ‘outworkers’ are non-English-speaking.
 * · During the 1980s demand for jeans increased on average by 10% a year: Nostalgia – using Marvin Gaye’s song //I heard it through the grapevine// – increased Levi 501 sales by 800 per cent. But in the 1990s demand has stagnated or fallen – by 3% in 1997.
 * · In 1970 Australians bought 3.5 million pairs of jeans and 1.2 million men’s suits; over the next 20 years sales of jeans tripled, while sales of suits fell by more than half.
 * · Every American owns, on average, 7 pairs of wearable jeans.
 * · San Francisco-based Levi Strauss, the first producer of jeans, is now the world’s largest clothing manufacturer. Annual sales are worth $7 billion, 71% of them jeans or jeans-related items, with an annual publicity spend of $300 million in the US and $200 million outside.

We haven't been able to come into contact with 7 For All Man Kind, but we have called multiple times and know where their 4 major headquarters are (LA, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Tokyo). These are some of the questions we wish to ask them when they are finally available:

More questions to come......
 * What materials go into your jeans, and where do you get these materials from?
 * Are different parts of your jeans made in different factories and then assembled somewhere else?
 * Are the 7 jeans sold in America, made in America? If not, where are they imported from?
 * Do you know your carbon and/or H2O footprint for 1 pair of jeans?
 * What makes your jeans more expensive than others?

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