But how would clean gold work? First, the refinery would have to stop its cycle, clean the plant, and introduce the gold from the mine that wanted to keep its production stream discreet from other gold.
Is this likely? “We just couldn’t do that,” a spokesman for Johnson Matthey, a respected firm of gold refiners, told me. “We couldn’t run our business that way; it would cost too much.” Others disagree. “It would be expensive,” said Marguerite Nadeau, a vice president of the Royal Canadian Mint, which operates a gold refinery as part of its business, “but we have done it.”
When the Canadian government started selling gold coins in 1979, the enabling legislation stipulated that the coins be struck from Canadian gold. But demand outstripped the supply of purely Canadian gold, and they dropped the practice. Nevertheless, they showed it could be done.
A separate clean-gold stream is possible if demand appears either from jewelry manufacturers looking for a way to add value to their products, or from bullion dealers whose clients, such as bullion funds, were threatened with disinvestment because of bad press about blood gold.
That press could be just around the corner. A U.N. expert panel studying conflict gold has just delivered its report to the Security Council, which is expected to publish it in January.
Article Appeared @http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/12/13/is-there-a-way-around-the-sale-of-blood-gold/