The torrent of bloody gold is indistinguishable from innocent gold because of the way that gold refiners take gold from multiple sources. A refiner’s concern is not origin, but purity. In London, the world’s biggest bullion market, the standard known as “London Good Delivery” stipulates bars refined to a gold purity of 995 parts per thousand.
Refiners typically buy gold from many mines, and also from scrap dealers — the “gold for cash” trade. In Russia and the Persian Gulf, they also buy large amounts of gold mined by brutalized Congolese and the impoverished and victimized illegal miners of South Africa.
Few laws are in place to control the flow of stolen gold. In the United States, the Dodd-Frank Act makes companies account for the origin of minerals they buy that might come from the war zones of central Africa. This makes it harder for militias to sell such minerals as tin or tungsten. But gold is so portable — you can stuff $30,000 of it in a pants pocket and $700,000 in a briefcase — that smugglers move it easily to countries that are not scrupulous about where it comes from.
This raises the question: is a stream of “clean” gold possible, so a purchaser could know that her ring or bracelet was made of gold mined only from knowable sources? The answer is yes.
The diamond industry’s history suggests how it might work. When the campaign against blood diamonds was at its height, Canadian diamond miners and polishers created a rigorously monitored separate stream of “ice diamonds” — gemstones mined in the Arctic and certified free of taint from the murderous diamond fields of then-war-torn countries such as Angola and Sierra Leone.
What’s more, they sold them at a premium.